Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Tomorrow, In A Year is ideally suited for 10 Listens. Few bands have banked as much critical adulation as The Knife. By releasing few albums, touring little, and acting strange, The Knife and their impenetrably catchy music are blank slates upon which The Internet makes its offerings. Similarly, the dual concept of TIAY–it’s an opera and it’s about Charles Darwin–are vague and attractive. People with a nose for difficult (opera fans, dilettantes and pretenders alike) and the progressive (Swedes and Knife fans, likely) are sure to love the idea of TIAY. It’s easy an easy album to fall in love with. It’s an easy album to listen to and write an ecstatic blog post before never listening to it again. (How many times have you listened to your copy of Einstein on the Beach?)

After more than ten listens, the album remains very difficult to place. Tomorrow, In a Year is a difficult, confrontational piece. The album would actually be fairly dismissible as a performance souvenir if it weren’t being released worldwide. It may serve superlatively as the melos to the performance’s drama, but as a purely aural experience it somewhat fails to meet the high standard set by the Knife’s previous releases. Yet its ambition is abundant, and its intentions–while questionable–are quite clear. The Knife set out to create a vast, panoramic piece of music befitting humanity’s greatest scientific explanation for the vast, panoramic life surrounding it.

Aside from employing a talented mezzo-soprano, Kristina Wahlin, TIAY shares few traits with opera music. It begins not with a prologue but a song entitled “Intro,” which is little more than chirpy scuttling and loamy noise. “Intro” seems entirely appropriate because it implies a teleological perspective (ie, starting with nearly nothing and ending with… more), yet it also wastes four and a half minutes of the listener’s time.

It seems appropriate to note that the premise of the album, its meaning, is that meaning itself often lay dormant waiting to be unlocked. The fossil record, tree rings, or specific traits of animals are for evolutionary biologists all markers pointing to a broader picture. Mirroring that relationship, much of the album is comprised of noise and sound (it owes its existence to the notion of musique concrète) from which the listener draws acoustical relations. As anyone in conductive extensive field research knows, it is a very boring process to draw together a broader picture from mountains of discrete, seemingly haphazard data. Often, Wahlin’s voice seems to fight against the prevailing mood of the accompaniment. Tracks where she and the melody cooperate, like “Geology,” a song composed of layers of oscillating synthesizers and thin, clattering percussion, only show how odd the music is.

There is something almost maddening about the album. Across a given period, there is contrapuntal play, tone clusters, overpowering synthesizers, and skritching percussion–near simultaneously. And yet, there are moments when the listener’s head sets everything into place, and these moments are transcendentally awesome. The libretto (as it were), is in English, yet the lyrics sung by Wahlin are incomprehensible for the first few listens. But if it weren’t for her, many of the more noisy, painful, dissonant songs would be just that: noisy, painful dissonance. Her piercing voice contributes a human order to an otherwise arbitrarily mechanical soundscape–a technique that is not incidental.

One of the most satisfying listening experiences I had was driving home from work. It was dark and snowing in large volumes. Cars were stopped in the middle of the road because of the combination of oncoming headlights and snow. Even when the going was visible, it was treacherous. I started listening to “Variations of Birds,” which begins with a few seconds of piercing noise punctuated by scattershot synthesizers. As the tones and synthesizers repeat, their period increases and their frequencies oscillate until slowly a beat emerges from the sonic torture. Driving with these sounds blasting out my stock soundsystem resulted in a torturous, shrieking ride that nearly induced hallucinations. Without any strong visual percepts, and with such overwhelming aural ones, my brain started filling in odd color patches at varying depths and distances. I would have pulled over if I weren’t already traveling at less than 5 mph. As the song progresses, Jonathan Johansson and actor Laerke Winther sing the primary lyrics with Wahlin’s voice soaring like one of Rilke’s almost-deadly birds of the soul. There are many such moments in TIAY when out of painful tumult there emerges something approaching serene order.

The songs having as their focus Jonathan Johansson (a Swedish pop musician best known for his somewhat faithful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” ["Alla Vill Ha Hela Världen" to his Swedish fanbase]), are generally more cerebral. Johansson has a pleasant voice that is often buried under echo and reverb, but it’s disappointingly non-operatic. Likewise, Winther’s voice is not unpleasant, but it’s not as interesting as Karin Dreijer Andersson (of the Knife)’s voice, nor as beautiful as Wahlin’s.

As far as the Knife goes, it’s difficult to say how much of a hand they have in the creation of the album. There is a handful songs that sound very Knife-y (”Seeds” and “The Height of Summer,” primarily), but most of the album sounds very little like anything they have created previously. Perhaps the most Knife-like song is the album’s best song. “Colouring of Pigeons,” was understandably released early to build buzz for the album. Situated roughly two thirds of the way through the album, “Colouring of Pigeons” stands out immediately as (in relative terms) a real banger. It is the first song to have something approaching traditional song structure. It harnesses an actual melody nearly from the beginning. And it is immediately beautiful. Majestic percussion commences the song after a beautiful contrapuntal vocal part and Hildur Gättir’s cello introduce the melody of the song. Once Andersson starts singing, the listener is locked in and captivated. As all the elements of “Colouring of Pigeons” click into place, you finally get the sense that you’re listening to an actual, honest-to-goodness song rather than some kind of confrontational performance art.

Which isn’t to denigrate the achievements of the first half. Throughout, the music is engaging if austerely intellectual. But “Colouring of Pigeons” is music to fuck to, to dance to, to listen to and revel in. You want to listen to it over and over. Unlike much of the rest of the TIAY, which you want to listen to once and put away in a drawer. The dichotomy between songs like “Colouring of Pigeons” and “The Height of Summer,” which is basically a recapitulation of “Heartbeats,” forms the primary tension of critically evaluating TIAY. The album is creative. It makes confrontational noise infinitely more accessible than, say, Merzbow. Efforts like this should be rewarded. But would I listen to it all the way through very frequently? No. A music’s use is as much a part of its meaning as its harmonic structure, and besides accompanying actual performance of TIAY, I don’t see the music having many uses. I tried listening to it driving, running, fucking, working, writing–in a lot of contexts–and I found myself enjoying it for originality and daring more than for how it sounds. I would not listen to the album frequently, but I recommend it heartily to anyone who enjoys good music. Plus, you can always listen to “Colouring of Pigeons” on repeat.