fever_ray cr0wl i stop to listen, pausing to hear a sound that has been traveling for fifty years and has just reached me today. the soundtrack for the time i didn't know who i was. 090413 ... rt “Half of what the songs are about is the subconscious,” she says, “ideas of things happening. A lot of it is like daydreaming, dreaming when you’re awake, but tired; a lot of stories come from that world. I try to write when I‘m in that state - I’m very bad at remembering later, so I have to do it right away.” 090419 ... rt What do you do as an artist when you have the world at your feet? The logical answer is to bang out another record and make hay whilst the sun shines. But Karin Dreijer Andersson, who along with sibling Olof Dreijer makes up much lauded Swedish duo The Knife, had other ideas. She decided to lock her self away and rebuild her home studio in the middle of deepest darkest winter. This is the story of Fever Ray… “It was in late 2006 and we needed a break because The Knife had been working for seven years together,” says the sweetly spoken Andersson. “At first I didn’t have any goals like making an album, I just wanted to rebuild my studio and start from the beginning and see what happened.” What happened was her self titled debut Fever Ray. It is an ambient masterpiece that is rather like the layer upon layer of leaves that slowly decompose on the forest floor. Make no mistake this is not a record for the casual listener; it does take time to digest, but put the time in and you’ll be rewarded with a sound that, although heavily electronic and distorted in one sense, is equally tribal and organic in the other. And then there’s the voice. It is haunting. It is confronting. It is sublime. “My music is a lot of everything. I think it has very many layers sound wise and I tried to work with a very deep soundscape. I was completely free to do anything. But it was also scary. I had been working with Olaf for such a long time that I didn’t know how I would work on my own,” says Andersson of the creative process. There is that real sense of space and isolation on Fever Ray – a hallmark of her Scandinavian contemporaries. When on the slow burning 'I’m Not Done' Andersson delivers the deadpan line “Do you laugh when screaming? Is it cold outside?” you know that it most certainly is. “We don’t have much sun at all. We haven’t seen it for months now,” says Andersson of the bitterly cold winter, before adding: “I think you get used to it but you still get affected by it.” So what was life like growing up wedged between Abba fanatics & Bjorn Borg mania? “I grew up 20km outside Gothenburg. It was very small. Not even a village, just houses in rows. It was very calm, and quiet, and very boring. We had tennis, everybody played tennis. But our family was not into sport at all so we were outsiders.” And it is with that statement that Fever Ray begins to make sense. Fever Ray will make her live bow on a small string of Scandinavian dates beginning this month. If the whispers of The Knife’s shows are anything to go by, they will be a visually stunning experience. Says Andersson: “It took seven years for The Knife to do something live. Then we did 20 shows. And then we quit! I think it is interesting playing live but it is not comforting. It is a little bit scary but that just makes it more important to do it.” Fever Ray’s self titled album is available digitally right now and gets a full release on March 21st via EtcEtc through Universal. 090419 ... cocoon I've been enjoying Tiga's remix of Triangle Walks. 090420 ... rt 1..2..3..4 nice, thanks for the heads up. 090420 what's it to you? who go blather from