It was just the beginning of 2006 when the Swedish duo Knife released "Silent Shout", which has now become a classic of the past decade. That album, containing gems like "Like a Pen", forever consecrated the two Venetian masks as champions of the Swedish electro/synthpop scene. Acclaim for the duo's work came from multiple fronts, with nominations for various Grammys and several skirmishes/diversions with the media followed. The duo, which in just five years produced three albums, waited a full seven years to give that work a worthy successor. One could argue that in this period, they did not remain in the background: there was the collaborative album in 2010, and Karin released an excellent solo work under the name Fever Ray... Yet it was a pleasure to see that the Swedish duo's project had not been shelved. The pleasure is doubled considering both the quantity of material offered and the quality of the release.
Tackling an analysis that accounts for the universe opened by this latest "Shaking the Habitual" is an arduous task, to say the least.
To start, one could begin, in a banal way, from where it all started. "Shaking the Habitual", a title with Foucaultian memories, turns towards themes of feminism and is very critical of the political situation in recent years (with a clear nod to the Swedish royal family). Karin herself confirms this in an interview given last April and available on their YouTube channel. Throughout all this, there is also a strong stance on the recent policies applied by the music industry (a series of topics that would find strong resonance with what Dj Sprinkles has done).
Beyond the themes chosen for this new work, it is the arrangements, the rhythms, and the choice of timing that make this latest effort hard to digest. While the themes may seem tied to an intellectualism "at all costs", the compositions themselves can border on a desire to experiment almost ruthlessly and with little regard for the listener.
The will to propose a "protest" music that can be adapted to our times, the desire to detach from the sinister masks that were becoming an institution and barrier, the stimulus to research traditional or self-made instruments: all this is detectable in the background of this album's thirteen tracks.
A work that surely requires time to be assimilated. Consider that, putting aside the complexity of the pieces present, the three LPs exceed an hour and a half of listening, even testing the most tenacious listeners.
The overture is entrusted to "A Tooth for an Eye" (used as the second single last March): a track that, right from the start, reveals the duo's interest in world music and tribal rhythms (present throughout almost the entire album).
Adding more strength to this first trailblazer are the nine minutes of "Full of Fire", which, in the writer's opinion, is the true peak of the entire record. Chosen as the lead single, it presents itself as an ideal bridge between what Knife has been and what they will be. The pounding, industrial-like rhythms serve as a backdrop to a series of sounds that condense what will be discussed, more extensively, in the tracks that follow: ultra-filtered voices, use of arpeggiators on high-pitched mallets, basses soaked in bit reduction, occasionally lopsided ping pong effects.
The range of ideas and experiments scattered across these 90 minutes is immense.
In addition, the use of traditional instruments from not only European but also African and Asian traditions should not be overlooked. Give a listen to the Japanese winds perfectly integrated with the percussion of "Without You my Life would be Boring". The impression is that of being catapulted directly to the banks of the Ganges.
The entire album proceeds with an alternation of expansive and sulfurous landscapes contrasted with tracks featuring broken and epileptic rhythms ("Networking" above all), putting the listener in a state of constant disorientation. The possibility of finding the synthpop of previous works is indeed there, but it is all filtered by a different awareness ("Raging Lung", "Stay Out Here"). Seven years pass for everyone.
The 20 minutes of track number 7, "Old Dreams waiting to be realized", deserve a separate discussion. In this case, the process of experimentation is taken to the extreme, the times are further expanded (consider that the piece alone takes up an entire side of the second vinyl), the rarefied air of pieces like "Fracking Fluid Injection" is pushed to its limit. It creates a sort of colossal ambient piece that does not let a single ray of light through, brushing moments where one can perceive only the background noise of the machines. Placed in the middle of the work, this track is the black hole from which all the material of the work is extracted and into which it cyclically reconverges.
The years of waiting for a new long-distance work have shown a duo capable of expressing rare potential in today's scene. Unfortunately, with all the associated pros and cons. A group that should be praised also for their compositional skills, finding in the most extreme episodes the right corollary of an eclectic creativity. And not vice versa.
Tracklist
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