For
the promotion of their third album, “Silent shout”, The Knife did a photo shoot with Elin Berge out on a snowfield next to a forest around dawn. Their long
black coats, wigs and the masks over their faces came to start a lot of talk about the mysterious group. The reason for why they choose this “image” for the
promotion of this album was, according to Olof: We feel like that if we had been there with our
plain faces, that would destroy the illusion of the music. So we tried to dress up as the music. Occult and dark, but at the same time funny.
Karin states for a biography on The Knife’s website www.theknife.net: If we could choose not to do any photos at all, we would. But it’s quite impossible. Because I
don’t think it has anything to do with the music. So we use the photos now to show what our music looks like.
We have been making music for seven years and with every year you are getting close to what kind of music you really want to do. I think we are pretty close.
In that song particularly: because it has all the elements that we like - it’s very sad, but hard and beautiful at the same time. And it’s cold, but it’s warm.
A lot of qualities! she laughs.
The “Silent Shout”-album was released in February 2006 and immediately rocketed to the album charts, debuting at #1 and staying in the top-10 for four
weeks. “Silent Shout” was in the charts for a total of 15 weeks.
The Knife announced in February that they were going to do five live shows in Sweden and Europe, their very first “real” live performances ever. The 30th
of March at Berns in Stockholm, the day after that at Mejeriet in Lund, after that shows in Scala, London and Maria in Berlin before ending the tour at
Trädgårn in Gothenburg on the 12th of April. Andreas Nilsson once again got to make the visuals for this tour. Their show lasted for nearly an
hour this time and consisted of songs from all three records, but mostly the newest “Silent shout”. All these five shows were sold out and the show in
Gothenburg was recorded and was later released in November 2006 under the title “Silent Shout: An Audio Visual Experience”.
Karin said
in an interview with the newspaper
Sydsvenskan’s Jonas
Grönlund about finally going out on a
tour and why they didn’t do it until now.
We had
thought
about doing shows for many years, but
never came up with any good ideas of how we
actually could do it. After we released “Deep Cuts”
we had many ideas of doing some sort of
Laurie Anderson-show, but lacked the money to
make that happen. And now it is Andreas
(Nilsson) that
has made all this. She continues:
We’re very involved in the visual part
of the show.
We’ve worked with Andreas a long time now and
it feels assuring. ... It has taken time to
realise how we can do a show. It’s easy to think
that a live performance must
be in a certain way. It’s now that we are brave even to try to do it the way
we want to. It’s very little live, more like a performance.
When asked
about the new “Silent Shout”-release she
states: On this new record we used
a lot of new
equipment and instruments. We didn’t use
any old analogue synthesizers this time, just
modern stuff. We’re not interested in retro and
nostalgia. We want to make modern or at least
contemporary music where there’s hope somewhere.
If you do that with old instruments
it can easily sound as if we’re reactionary.
In an interview for
Swedish radio in March 2008 Karin describes the nature of "Silent Shout". I
don't see it as a record about fear. More towards anxiety and sadness. To me,
fear is more a state where you're feeling very very small.