![]() After all, the song ends on the line “I caught a glimpse now it haunts me.” In an eerie fashion, the odd, asexual voice (a man? an alien? an old woman?) wraps over to the last song on the album, “Still Light”. Now, nightmares that feature the loss of teeth and the inability to scream are common, but there is something more sinister to all this. “In a dream I lost my teeth again / Calling me woman and a half man,” Karin sings, “Yes in a dream all my teeth fell out / A cracked smile and a silent shout.” “Silent Shout”, with its muted techno beats and gloomy vocoder, mysteriously dances around a particularly traumatizing incident: “I never knew this could happen to me / I know now fragility / I know there’s people who I haven’t told / I know of people who are getting old.” It would be too easy to link the lyrics here to an abuse narrative, because – at its core – the anxiety here is cosmic, as any sense of stability is removed. ![]() And judging from its opening track, which shares the record’s title, this might well have been intentional. It could well be a crude joke, but it could also be an introduction to a deeper truth hidden within the cold confines of the album’s medial surface. Like a metallic eye, or part of a larger machine, it directs towards its black void in its middle. The comparison to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side reveals a hidden truth: where the Brits’ prism refigured light into a rainbow, the Dreijers’ dark disk seems to swallow it. Judging by its cover, Silent Shout gives off an almost industrial flair. From its cover – a metallic representation of a blue, rusty metal CD – to the many haunting music videos, Silent Shout is more than the sum of its parts. And while this would do justice to the music, it would also ignore Karin’s cryptic poetry, The Knife’s political interests, and the visual imagery of the era. It would be easy to just frame these 11 songs by their influences a sort of hybrid of Kraftwerk’s Mensch Maschine, The Resident’s Eskimo, and fellow nordic Björk’s catalogue – not to mention a variety of world musical and techno adjacent influences. Stylizing themselves as obscure Faery Folk, siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer succeeded in crafting a sort of Nordic Dark Side of the Moon a collection of vignettes that expanded on political and mythical imagery in compositions that appear both childlike and complex, organic and crystalline, eerily familiar and exotic. No other work of the modern era is as indicative and suggestive of this netherworld than The Knife’s Silent Shout, which turned 15 last month. Sex and death, beauty and ugliness are always interconnected within Swedish folklore, reflecting on a dark side to the nation’s shared subconscious. And while the female Hulders are those most commonly found in Swedish folklore, there was also the male counterpart hideously ugly, with long noses, resembling the many trolls of Scandinavian tales rather than their female counterparts. Those who lay with them would be forced to stay true to them, or else, their betrayal would end in their downfall or demise. ![]() Those who would come across them would find themselves entranced in their beauty and seductive ways, which even included the ability to take up that of their partners. Those children would become known as Hulder: forest deities who from the front would resemble a beautiful girl, but from the back were hollow and had a tail. God saw through her deception and decided that those hidden would have to hide from humanity. In shame, she decided to hide those that were still dirty. When god came to visit a small Swedish cottage, he surprised the woman living there, as she was washing her children. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |