She’s quick to talk about how the visual arts influence her songwriting, citing filmmakers Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers) and Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismaki as direct influences. Those two directors fill the screen with ideas rather than words, and that sense of a-literalism translates into the cloudy possibilities of a Fever Ray song. Karin even went so far as to say that Fever Ray’s small-bore electronic structure was paced after Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man.
This affection for the visual arts carries into Karin’s performances, and indeed, theater has always been a large part of The Knife’s identity. Karin and Olof often appear in bizarre costumes for photo shoots, their live shows feature the pair in full-body (head and face included) vinyl suits, they obstruct the stage with netting, and they generally assault the audience with lights and bizarre film clips that are strategically pegged to the sound or theme of a song.
Karin will tell you that rather than being theater for the sake of mystery building, this is an attempt at bringing the music to the forefront by separating the listener from both the artist and the source of the sound. “I don’t think that it’s about being mysterious, and it’s nothing that I’m trying to do,” she says. “The music itself should be so good that it doesn’t have to be attached to a person or a face.”
That theory may play to the core of The Knife’s identity, but Fever Ray is obviously the work of a solo artist. With Fever Ray, Karin gives listeners a glimpse behind the masks. “When my first child came, it had a big influence on the Silent Shout album,” she says. “But with Olof involved, it was difficult to incorporate some of those ideas. I’ve taken it a little bit further on this album; I think it’s more personal.”
As a blue-blooded artist, Karin surely will infuse Fever Ray with a unique aesthetic. She’s currently practicing with a band (this is a new discipline for her) before hitting the road for shows in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Andreas Nilsson, a long-time collaborator and choreographer for The Knife, will be directing the Fever Ray performances (he’s also responsible for Karin’s über-creepy “If I Had a Heart” video, in which two children are calmly shuttled away from the nightmarish scene of a cult procedural gone wrong). Karin was hesitant to give away too many details of the live performance, but let on that “it will be a collision between analog and high tech, but more organic to fit the Fever Ray sound.”
On top of supporting the Fever Ray album, she will join Olof in the studio for another Knife album sometime next year. After divulging that development, Karin lets out an unscripted laugh, as if she had just run through a mental checklist of everything that’s currently on her plate. “But 2009,” she says, “is for Fever Ray.”