“We were asked to give a personal touch and also to try to imagine Darwin’s internal psychology”

One of the key tracks from Tomorrow, in a Year seems to be ‘Annie’s Box’ – a song about the death of Darwin’s 10-year old daughter. Rightly or wrongly there is this idea that scientists are quite aloof from the world whereas Darwin was very much a family man, so was there an idea to show his human side with that song?

“We were asked to give a personal touch and also to try to imagine Darwin’s internal psychology. ‘Ebb Tide Explorer’ is one of the tracks that goes into this – he had gained a knowledge that in the beginning he didn’t want to take in because he had a religious background. He was seeing all these proofs in the world, seeing that what he had learned was wrong so this kind of internal struggle must have been quite strong.

“’Annie’s Box’ was also an attempt to show his personal side. He seems to have been quite a caring father for his time: he wrote very nice words about his kids and he would involve them in his process and he also wrote very emotional words about the death of his daughter Annie.”

You’re releasing the album under a Creative Commons license. What’s the thinking behind that?

“That’s like an attempt to show that this piece is really a kind of musical exercise, a study of others’ work: we have studied all this Darwin and all this literature and also studied earlier music for modern dance. I think any study, or research if you want to call it that, should be shared and not copyrighted. Another reason is to encourage creative listening rather than ‘illegalise’ any people who choose to be creative with the music.”

The opera, as well as its premiere in Denmark, has also been performed in Greece and Sweden, and it’s going to Germany in June. Given the subject matter, I would say the place it most needs to be heard is the US. Are there any plans to take it over there or is that not going to happen?

“I don’t really know actually: it’s a bit out of my hands. They are talking about different places here and there and one of Hotel Pro Forma’s earlier pieces from the 90s is still running, so it seems like they can go on sporadically over some years.”

I presume you were at the premiere in Copenhagen: how you feel seeing the opera?

“The fact that we worked on the music for one-and-a-half years but it was brought together with the other parts of the piece only three months before the premiere made for quite an exciting process. But because of this long process for us with the music we had developed our own images in our minds and they were very different from what we saw on stage. It was really interesting to see what the other people did, for example, the choreographer hadn’t heard our music until maybe two months before the performance, so everything was done very separately – it is many shows going on at the same time on stage.

“Someone else’s understanding of the music and how they choose to see it is really interesting. I like when things are very open to interpretation, that’s why we want to release the record like this, with the black and white cover, and let people create their own show with it.”

What have you learned from working with the opera company and Matt [Mt. Sims] and Janine [Planningtorock] that you would like to incorporate into your next recordings or your live presentation?

“I learned a lot and I think that the collaboration between me, Karin, Janine and Matt has been really, really great: it has made the most exciting music in the piece. Just coming up with an interesting process has been really exciting, and I’m happy to continue in different collaborations, that’s really the learning thing here.”

So, what’s next for The Knife?

“I don’t know really. I’m studying at university now this half year – Gender Studies. We are putting out this release as we have our own label and then just taking it easy and we’ll see what’s next. I have many different projects and The Knife is a project that when we decide to work together we go into a kind of intense process – so, we’ll see when that will be.”

Justin Toland

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.