the kniφe - shaking the habitual

the question is whether this album resists politics/capitalism successfully or just referents its own political context and i'm not sure it does that.

This is an incoherent statement; are you not sure it resists politics/capitalism successfully or are you not sure it just referents its own political context? Also, why are you equating "politics" with "capitalism"?

"pop" in the pazz and jop sense, big tent

And why would it need to resist politics? It can't!

i'm really trying to shift politics into capitalism since 'politics' as a term being used here is meaningless, and i meant that i'm not sure it's successfully resisting capitalism. it's doing lots of great things tho! i love the sound, it reminds me a lot of fever ray which is my fave album by *them* so far and i love her voice and i even like the tonal seriousness and fuck you 19 minute tracks. i just don't see it doing anything interesting on a 'political' level. xxp

The Knife might well be one of the first electronic acts to do something like this, although it seems to be musically and aesthetically aligned with a few other recent albums, particularly Let England Shake, The Seer and maybe Bish Bosch. There's one track that even sounds a bit like footwork on here.

i guess what i mean is that music that is 'political' is just locutionary but illocutionary music actually needs to fight the power

maybe I am totally romanticizing my industrial/industrial dance/acid techno past but I feel like this album would have fit in very well on Nettwerk Records circa 1987/1988, with chunks also comparable to +8 Records circa 1992, so I kind of don't get the "no one has ever done this before" conversation

xp - i don't accept that characterization. art can work towards its political aims in a variety of ways. simply raising an idea is an illocutionary act.

@ DJP specific tracks pls!

xp: I mean, I was never a huge fan of the track but the whole point of Speedy J's "Pullover" is that he spends 5+ minutes shifting the drums every 2 measures, adding things in and dropping them out and changing the rhythm pattern, and I think over the course of the track he repeats maybe 3 patterns? and one time is in direct succession where it's clearly an intentional "I am changing the pattern by not changing the pattern here" decision; it's proto-"Full of Fire" and a lot of Speedy J's 90s tracks are in that realm.

lol I swear I was writing this before FGTI posted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3Ls1mVyKk

wish I'd Spotify so I could assemble this playlist.

xpost - DJP, Speedy J is a major influence on Chicago footwork producers like DJ Rashad and I'm def hearing elements of that music in STH

but yeah sonically this album spans a broad range of touchpoints for me: early Severed Heads, particularly Come Visit The Big Bigot-era songs like "Sam Loves You", "Harold and Cindy Hospital" and "Strange Brew" and a good chunk of their tape fuckery period around Since The Accident and City Slab Horror, Cabaret Voltaire's 78-82 best of, Bites and VIVISECT VI-era Skinny Puppy, a ton of acid stuff like F.U.S.E. or my personal hobby horse track "Exposure" by Peak Experience, the aforementioned Speedy J, the Doubting Thomas album that was a Skinny Puppy/Severed Heads collaboration

Agree it's not that radical an album, sonically. It's def doing things differently, but ten years after Kid A I don't really see why people are finding it quite such a culture shock. That said, what it does, it does extremely well and in the way it's sequenced, in the lyrical choices and the way it blends electronic and acoustic sounds, it does feel like something very original.

I mean, you wanna talk about trance-inducing shit like "Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized", let's talk about Severed Heads' "Gashing the Old Mae West":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fch4YoMz_t8

i'm late to the discussion but:

1) if having really long songs and drones and weirdly constructed, non-repetitive music is a sign of political radicalism, then yes is the leon trotsky of rock

2) would anyone really be talking about 'politics' w/r/t this album if there weren't a few signifiers thrown in the lyrical mix that prompt us to do so?

3) this album is fucking incredible

also yeah DJP put together a playlist yo

Cool track DJP! I def hear a lot of sonic similarities. I'm saying "radical" bc of the way the material is handled, though, i.e. generatively or pseudo-generatively, see also "Confield" and Paul Dolden and any number of electroacoustic composers or Max/MSP nerds. The difference is that this album ~sounds great~ in a way that suggests it was made painstakingly with real hardware synths, or was just made really well with softsynths

amateurist I agree with 1 and 2 and also 3

xxp yeah, do it, D! i know next to nothing about the music you've mentioned (except obvious stuff like early skinny puppy and cab voltaire).

just gonna post songs from my past that fall into the various sonic arenas that I feel this album plays in; not to say all of these songs are constructed in the same way or are "better", but rather that there's a known vocabulary here that this album is operating within that I fucking love

Skinny Puppy - "Love" from the album Bites (which btw if you don't have that album FUCKING GET IT IT IS AMAZING FRONT TO BACK)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh2OOvpiDhs

from that same album, "Church"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA9Khv4NE1k

was gonna post "Assimilate" but yeah everyone knows that already; I just don't think they would consciously link it to the triplet shuffle of "A Tooth for an Eye" the way I did

Severed Heads - "Exploring the Secrets of Deaf Mutes" from Since the Accident

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__gj9XQqUOo

also by Severed Heads, "Goodbye Tonsils" from City Slab Horror (with tracks from Blubberknife)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH6X3txWyTs

out of the industrial tape loop realm and more into the 90s acid scene, I keep going on and on and on about this track but it's fucking astonishing esp. on good bass-heavy speakers where you can feel the oscillations

"Exposure" - Peak Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J6O55zGWug

then Tresor Records comes into town:

"Ploy" - Maurizio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXPMp_-WdcU

"Der Klang Der Familie" - 3Phase feat. Dr. Motte (lol I posted this on another thread yesterday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTHIHpi5IJI

"Drugs Work" - System 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqCUQIE7zo8

btw I just ordered a fucking bomb-ass comp off of Amazon yesterday that is 3 discs of Tresor awesomeness and when it arrives I likely will disappear from ILX for a week

here's a Youtube playlist of the entire Doubting Thomas album, which was a Skinny Puppy/Severed Heads collaboration from 1991

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_afns-FBeK8&list=PL77B0179AC5620A7A

I'm getting tied up in a big nostalgia vortex here; the point behind is less "this is exactly what STI is doing" because obviously that's wrong, but rather "here are the foundations for this album and it's super cool where they've gone with it"

the clearest antecedent to this is the early Severed Heads stuff, which can be heard here:

http://severedheads.bandcamp.com/

Tom Ellard's transformation from "industrial tape loop nightmare man" into "techno New Order for weirdos" is one of my favorite things in all of music

OTOH, a big middle chunk of STH is 4th world pastiche ala:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZp3UaYtT3U

DJP, I'm psyched for your nostalgia trip. I love Tresor and hard 90s tehcno in general. Perhaps we need a hard techno thread in general. I can't recall much discussion of this stuff on ILM previously.

Think I started some several years ago now. I'd like a bit of that. Haven't listened to hard tech for ages

not feeling this album, i wanted more songs (which i'm sure has been discussed). i bought it blind without listening to a second of it beforehand. glad i only got the single disc of this album. yeah it's organic and has amazing sound. two listens in so maybe it gets better but i would rather hear Fever Ray at this point.

no 19-minute drone track, no credibility

i least i bought it, don't think too many can say that.

at least...

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.