The Knife’s new record Shaking The Habitiual sees the sibling duo of Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer travel down their darkest, possibly most experimental tangent yet.
In the build up to the Swedish pair’s fourth full-length album, which finally released this week on April 8th, it quickly became clear that the band’s first release in seven years was going to explore an unforeseen level of strange.
Their batshit insane antics perhaps peaked with their press bio for the new album, a part of the release process traditionally designed to give the world some understanding about the upcoming record instead read more like the crazed manifesto of mad scientist.
Starting with the opening line: “SOME FEELING IN THE BELLIES OF THE TANKERS WHO PASS US MAKING SAD MANIC BONGS LIKE DRUMS”
However, now that Shaking The Habitual is in the hands and ears of fans, the electronic music twosome have decided not to leave everyone completely in the dark and explain themselves in a new ‘making of’ short film, entitled ‘The Interview’, which answers some questions while creating others (without the mention of bongs).
Be warned, though: the video is directed by Marit Östberg, who was responsible for the mind-boggling short film for 10 minute lead single ‘Full Of Fire’, so don’t expect everything to make sense. “We didn’t want to make another album. We just wanted to do something, but had to find a purpose.” – The Knife
“We didn’t want to make another album. We just wanted to do something, but had to find a purpose,” Andersson and Dreijer explain in the video’s first lines, exchanging narration with each passing sentence.
The brother and sister pair reveal they found inspiration in “70s protest songs from [their] childhood”, and say that the purpose they eventually found was to “pose the question: what can a protest song be today?”
They detail the protests they strive to make, which primarily include “fighting against commercialised homogenisation” and “the image produced in the extreme heirarchical conservative structures that the music industry constitutes.”
No surprise then that the duo are collaborating with director Östberg, the self-described creator of feminist porn who directs the new making-of. The Stockholm and Berlin traversing filmmaker focuses on constrictive images of queer bodies, transgender sexuality, and feminist rights and politics in her work.
Similar themes The Knife are tackling in their new record, hiring Östberg to direct the ‘Full Of Fire’ video-come-short film, calling it: “Uncompromisingly current. Uncompromisingly sexy. Uncompromisingly political.
The collaborations between the two parties combine their respective sonic and visual elements to produce engaging, political art-house.
Also indulging in the complex recording process behind Shaking The Habitual, they how The Knife craft their unorthodox soundscapes. “We felt too safe behind the masks. [They] had become an image of The Knife. Something which had meant to question identity and fame had become a commercial product.” – The Knife
“We played traditional instruments in non-traditional ways and tried to find non-traditional ways of creating traditional sounds,” say the duo. “We wanted to find room where all sounds are just as odd or just as normal, where the border between normal and strange is erased.”
“We started improvising to find something less predictable… Then we played, and we played, and we played, to let go of what we already knew about music. And explore what we didn’t know: letting go.”
Their robotic, cyborg-esque narrations pop up sporadically between the video’s brilliant instrumental soundtrack, which is of course samples taken from the new 98-minute long record.
Andersson and Dreijer also speak of personal changes they’ve undergone over the past seven years, and that they plan to change the ambiguous nature of their public image created by the various masks and costumes they used to wear.
“We felt too safe behind the masks. The masks had become an image of The Knife. Something which had meant to question identity and fame had become a commercial product; an institution,” they explain. “We are people trying to do something we have never done. To not reproduce identities that are expected from us.”
“It’s time to move. To fall. To fly”, the pair say, laughing, in their final words before the video interview comes to its end.
