the kniφe - shaking the habitual

i only regret not springing the extra $12 for the 3lp. so much pink.

i actually should have bought the 3LP version. the problem is i have no modern LP's as all my albums are old stuff. plus my record play and records for that matter are in my garage.

play player

The 3lp is super beautiful. The so much pink has a nice greeness to it

Amateurist otm. I wouldn't have a problem with political slants to music if they could be expressed clearly, but generally they can't. It becomes a bit like people decoding scripture, finding nuggets that specifically appeal.

I mean, I suppose people do this with the words of politicians or political theorists, to an extent, but they're not as open to interpretation, and these people are subjected to scrutiny.

The problem with explicit politics in music is that if you start singing "Fuck John Major and the Criminal Justice Bill", you're already giving your songs up to redundancy in a couple of years time. In the case of Crass or Public Enemy it can have the positive effect of historical resonance but it's risky. On the whole a more universal approach to music and politics tends to work better.

I am really hoping Modeselektor does a remix of something off this.

one last touchpoint: Savage Aural Hotbed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvhKOpbkpY8

wish I could find a good clip of "Big Arms"

Not sonic touchstones, obviously, but Snivilisation was doing philosophy & politics & techno 19 years ago.

Sort of.

This is all very well and good, but all these examples are from before the agit-prop watershed of the mid-'90s. Even Autechre released the Anti-EP in 1994 (another example of instrumental electronic music as political statement). I really can't think of many good examples from the last fifteen years that does what STH is doing - especially not electronic music.

I'm mistrustful of theory in general but it doesn't make for great lyrics. Show don't tell.

so one minute the Knife aren't explicit enough, next they're too explicit... no pleasing some people.

dog latin, you are having an entirely different conversation from me

me: here is a bunch of music I listened to in the 80s and 90s that remind me of/prepared me for the textures and structures on Shaking the Habitual
you: NO ONE HAS BEEN POLITICAL FOR FIFTEEN YEARS
me: uh

The problem with explicit politics in music is that if you start singing "Fuck John Major and the Criminal Justice Bill", you're already giving your songs up to redundancy in a couple of years time.

for the record i don't really agree w/ what's being said about "political" lyrics. surely you can write well about politics as much as you can write well about love or friendship or anything else. unfortunately most pop musicians tend to take one of the following options: (1) a bunch of platitudes /banalities that pass as "politics" but don't mean a damn thing (call this the "u2" option, or perhaps the "will.i.am" option); (2) obscurantism; (3) sloganeering (the "rage against the machine" option, or maybe the "le tigre" option). this knife album seems mostly to indulge (2) with occasional flashes of (3).

none of these approaches seems ideally suited to the task of using poetic language to crystallize or reveal the layers of a "political" situation broadly construed. note that when the chips are down option (1) can do more good in the world, viz. "we are the world." option (3) only functions in a narrow context; i.e. preaching to the converted. i don't think there's really much glory in option (2).

of course many many people, in all kinds of genres, have transcended these two options. so politics in pop music is hardly doomed. i don't really pay enough attention to what's going on right now but reaching back into the distant past, elvis costello's "shipbuilding" is kind of an unassailable example of a sharp political lyric that's more than just sloganeering.

....on a totally separate note, the "ambient" tracks here, unlike the vast majority of "ambient" or "drone" tracks on records by pop-rock bands, are actually really good and thought-through. IMO.

terre thaemlitz / dj sprinkles / ultrared to thread

xxpost No DJP - I'm not disagreeing with you, sorry I got a bit confused - just realised you're posting examples of stuff that is musically similar to STH but Nick threw me off by mentioning Snivilisation as an example of dance + politics.

This aside, I think that while 'Snivilisation' is a good examples of something that might have informed or preceded STH, such examples can be found in abundance throughout the '80s and '90s, tailing off at a certain point circa 1995. Much of late-80s and early-90s dance/industrial/rave culture was politically informed or counter-culturally influenced in some way. Going out to a rave in a warehouse or to a field was seen as a form of activism or rule-breaking at least, while the music itself was demonised by the mainstream media, frowned upon by the establishment for its repetitiveness and the fact it 'made' teenagers take drugs. There are dozens of examples, from 'Dance Before The Police Come' to The Orb's more subtle use of samples on tracks like 'Towers Of Dub' ('Is there a Haile Selassie there? No.') that used dissent or cultural touchstones to make certain points. The introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in the UK is a possible reason for dance music shedding a lot of its political slant.

So we blame Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, for making dance music entirely about hedonism and not about activism?

wow, really struck by the extent to which "exploring the secrets of deaf mutes" anticipates the basic sound not only of this album, but of the knife in general. also seems to point towards boards of canada's geogaddi (since that's been discussed recently). and i can certainly connect the speedy j track to "full of fire".

thing is, echoing what i said earlier, it's fairly easy for me to see the skinny puppy, severed heads and speedy j tracks existing in some kind of functional context where they more-or-less square with user needs. the former belong to industrial-goth nighclub spaces (or dorm rooms) in which nocturnal menace, urban alienation and harsh beats help build an appropriately morbid atmosphere. the latter is straight dance music (same goes for peak experience, tresor). these tracks & sounds have a comprehensible place & purpose. it's harder to slot shaking the habitual into an existing "use profile" or w/e.

Again, my point is maybe .5% "Ho hum it's all been done before" and 99.5% "look at all of these disparate sources they've pulled together in making this awesome album"

I am not at all try to diminish or pooh-pooh The Knife'd creativity; I'm trying to recreate the context from which I'm approaching this album and share it with others, hopefully giving another avenue/dimension for people to explore plus perhaps revive some interest for old faves of mine.

xxpost to Sick Mouthy - IMO it's not so much about the acts, more to do with a number of factors making dance culture more acceptable. By making raves illegal, dance music's milieu moved from suburban fields and inner-city warehouses into commercially-run clubbing environments. Going clubbing was hedonistic, but not necessarily rebellious. It's also to do with dance music becoming accepted by the indie and mainstream media as an auteur art-form with 'proper' albums rather than a throwaway fad. Dance music simply became assimilated by society, permeating the pop charts, being used in TV adverts etc. It just wasn't this edgy new youth-corrupting sound any more. Also - by the time Britpop and Girl Power rolled round, there was a general mistrust of agit-prop in cultural media. Soapboxing was seen as the pursuit of crustie swamp-dwelling dullards with stuff like PWEI and Levellers being branded deeply unfashionable. Think this all had a big knock-on effect for politics in electronic music.

looking forward to checking all these tracks out btw DJP - maybe a Spotify playlist / own thread could be in order?

so the live show is proving divisive...

Saw a clip on pitchfork before the record company took it down. Seemed a bit more like a dance recital than a traditional concert.

so spotify has the whole record now

so the live show is proving divisive...

― Number None, Tuesday, April 30, 2013 11:20 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's certainly been interesting to read the comments on it over the last few days... loads of people complaining about being "ripped off", but also just as many throwing phrases around such as "artistic statement". If The Knife deliberately set out to confound, then it's certainly worked!

spoilers ahead

great things about the live show

- they start with 'A Cherry On Top' and 'Raging Lung', both sound great and it seems at this point a full ensemble is on stage performing the songs
- the remixed version of Got 2 Let U with a new skippy House tempo (makes up for the otherwise baffling inclusion of this song in the set)
- a few other amazing sonic bits here and there as to be expected including the music just after the show finale threatening to turn into a Knife rework of Pon De Floor
- version of 'Silent Shout' very good but undermined slightly by...

bad things about the live show

- ...K & O seemingly only present on stage for around half the set at best, leaving much of it to the dance troupe, backing tracks and lip-syncing and all
- LOTS of very obvious popular songs you would expect them to play from the back catalogue not in the set list
- pretty much everything else

looking forward to reading what the London gig-goers make of the show tonight. can't ever recall seeing such a high level of complaints from fans on a band's own Facebook pages etc. genuine heartbroken outrage and ranting left right and centre.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

So what's the deal with these shows? They look pretty fun from the shaky YouTube clips I've seen

I am so bummed I didn't get to see them last night in Amsterdam, show was sold out in seconds.

It's been an extremely divisive gig, reading the reviews and twitter etc. Perhaps the most divisive one in a decade. I can't remember fans of a group being so divided into those who are repulsed and those who are full of admiration.

Going off twitter, London's show tonight has the same outcome.

A 20 minute aerobics warm-up, *nothing* sung live, the band leaving the stage for a whole song, theatre.. It must have been really something.

It all sounds like this century's Rite of Spring!

If you don't go in with the expectations of watching a band play live, then it's OK. Having read the comments about the tour so far, I had pretty low expectations.

Couldn't see much of the dancing on stage, but I can sort of see their point. A lot of this album couldn't have been performed live anyway, so I sort of see the band's point in not even pretending to play and just dance on stage instead. Which would have been great if everyone in the audience could actually see what's going on onstage (the Roundhouse is awful for this).

It would have been awesome in a venue where the stage isn't the focal point of the room. Imagine if it was some club where there are dancers everywhere and the audience are just there to dance and have fun. But in a normal venue where everyone expects to look at the front, it just didn't quite work.

I say fair play to em, but then I didn't get tickets on time

I mean, what would you rather see: a bunch of people losing it on stage with a cool light show and wicked music or two people standing stock still behind keyboards duly going through half-rendered versions of the album tracks? Shaking the Habitual, to me, is Dada-esque in its use of artFORM as anarchy - presenting itself in ways that are structurally different from how we have come to expect and accept. The whole thing is about challenging tropes. Kind of reminds me of an idea for a gig I wanted to do where the audience is handed a church-service style pamphlet with the proceedings of the night laid out; the set list, lyrics, whether there would be a break for audience banter, whether there would be an encore etc.... People don't expect to be given the running order when they go to concerts, but they do when they go to church which is strange because to an alien the two activities are extremely similar.

I totally agree (and also was too late for tickets). In form it is definitely dada-esque, and I noticed I have missed artists that do this, confuse and harshly break through conventions.

I have noticed they have made a conscious decision to separate the 'message' of the album - which is a strong one, even if I haven't fully figured it out yet - from the shows. They use the interviews for the political side of their music, the gender-issues, but they use their shows to disrupt. Both are equally anarchist and militant, but I think it is a very clever strategy.

Think I just missed music challenging me so much. I find the new album breathtaking, annoying, painstaking and beatiful, sometimes all at the same time. I embrace the confusion.

It would have be awesome if their gig was more like that Neon Neon Praxis Makes Perfect gig or immersive theatre thing. For Full of Fire the band and dancers stood still on stage in hooded tops. If you had wandered across them during the song, it would have been terrifying. But it just didn't quite work in a venue like the Roundhouse.

terrific show. terrific concept and execution (although jill's caveat about sightlines is otm). i liked the displacement of focus away from she & he, the deliberate disruption of the cult-of-personality that gigs sometimes represent. i don't know why people are so invested in seeing The Band perform The Hits, especially with music that isn't going to be created live in front of you regardless of whether karin and olof are on stage or not. compared to the last knife show i saw, circa silent shout, where they did just that, this was so much more unpredictable and dynamic.

also i do wonder, who exactly did the whingers think they were going to see? this was not exactly out of character. anyone who was "heartbroken" about that gig needs to have a word with themselves.

"lip-syncing" doesn't even half cover it, either. at points you had six dancers, all with mics, all lip-syncing, one of whom may or may not have been karin. the one time the spotlight was on a single figure it was a woman seated at a piano getting her tori amos on. you assumed it was karin until you realised the song had no piano in it

Are you writing a review for the Graun about it Lex?

nah if i was i'd be doing it now, not on the internet!

however i will be talking to them tomorrow about it.

this new knife codswallop sounds like pretentious, overrated rubbish IMHO

regards,
nilmar

have you listened to it?

many people consider listening to a record an important part of evaluating it

xxp Lex, yeah makes sense.

Enjoy the interview! Dutch online mag got a great interview out of them. It went from gender politics to music, from expectations of the crowd to Olof being a bigger feminist than Karin, from penetration being unnecesary and overrated to inserting a bludgeon with a condom around it!

the one time the spotlight was on a single figure it was a woman seated at a piano getting her tori amos on. you assumed it was karin until you realised the song had no piano in it

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), Wednesday, May 8, 2013 8:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

thats awesome

looking forward to reading what the London gig-goers make of the show tonight. can't ever recall seeing such a high level of complaints from fans on a band's own Facebook pages etc. genuine heartbroken outrage and ranting left right and centre.

i'm reading these now and my gawwwwwd, people's sense of entitlement to this rigid idea of what they expect a gig to be. is this a recent development? when i started going to gigs, NO WAY did i expect to hear certain songs, and i never got the impression anyone else did. you are paying to hear LIVE ART which is (or should be) inherently unpredictable. (related: i think the entire concept of don't look back concerts is contemptible.)

and really i say "what kind of band did you think the knife were" but if BRITNEY FUCKING SPEARS decided to come out and on a whim perform a setlist entirely composed of her deep cuts that is HER PREROGATIVE. (and i'd fucking love it, she has enough quality deep cuts.) you purchase a ticket, not a right to dictate the setlist.

i might now spend the next hour thinking about my dream #deepbritneyalbumcuts setlist

Um, I think millions would disagree, Lex.