shaking the habitual show 2013
刀子(The Knife)是一个瑞典的电子音乐团体，其音乐实验性质浓厚，成员是一对姐弟，姐姐卡琳·德雷杰·安德森以她的尖锐独特嗓音闻名。
自瑞典歌手José González在国外表演了他们的歌曲〈Heartbeats〉后，他们渐渐广为海外听众知晓，在欧洲他们目前拥有不俗的知名度。
刀子两姐弟同时也是女性主义人士，并曾捐钱给瑞典女性主义政党女性主义行动先锋，希望能帮助他们进入国会。
The Knife's Olof Dreijer has just uttered a word that strikes fear into the heart of every right-thinking pop fan. Explaining how he and his bandmate and sister Karin Dreijer Andersson rebooted the Knife after six years of doing other things, he reveals that they started to "just meet up and jam".
Olof Dreijer 在谈论跟自己的姐姐Karin Dreijer于耽搁6年之后重组刀子乐队（The knife）的经历时，提到了一个让每位头脑清醒的粉丝都感到担心的一个词：我们擦出了火花，接着就陷入了“困境”。
Jamming? Isn't that what burnt-out old rockers do when contractual obligations force them back into the studio and they realise that they don't have any songs? But the Knife's were no ordinary jam sessions. Instead of noodling away on vintage Strats, the primary instruments at their disposal were a zither and a bedspring in a box, played with a bow, processed through a modular synthesizer to distort the sound. "After a year, we had some material that was pretty different from the Knife," says Olof, with calm understatement. "At first we talked about releasing this under another name. Then we thought it's actually more funny to call it the Knife."
陷入“困境”？这是江郎才尽的摇滚歌手们才会遇到这样的情况。当他们不得不依据合同契约里的条款重返录音室，却发现自己再也创作不出新的音乐的时候，这就是所谓的“困境”。然而刀子乐队的瓶颈期绝不普通。他们没有在复古流行乐舞台上即兴弹唱，反而演奏一些特殊的乐器，例如演奏齐特琴，用弓拉奏置于盒子里的弹簧，以及使用音乐模块合成器对声音进行加工处理。Olof 低调镇静地说：“一年后，我们弹奏的乐器跟刀子乐队时期所使用的很不一样。刚开始的时候，我们讨论过以别的名字发行新的专辑，接着我们又觉得还是继续叫刀子乐队比较有意思。”
He doesn't laugh when he says this – Olof and Karin are endearingly earnest interviewees – but the Knife have always got a kick out of confounding their audience. Easily their best-known song is 2002's Heartbearts, a joyous electropop hymn that propelled them on to the worldwide stage thanks to an early outbreak of blog buzz. Heartbeats also made the career of their countryman José González, who covered it in an advert-friendly acoustic style.
说道自己跟妹妹都是很好打交道的采访对象，并且面对听众，他们总是感到非常开心时，Olof并没有有笑。由于早期的“博客热” 他们的知名曲目2002年发行的《Heartbeats》是一首欢快的电子流行乐，这首歌轻而易举将他们送上了世界音乐舞台，积攒了很多人气。同时瑞典籍歌手José González也因翻唱的另一版本而名声大噪。
Conversely, their recent single Full Of Fire was electropop only in its most primitive, punkish sense, having more in common with Throbbing Gristle than Yazoo. Its brash, buffeting beats seemed designed for rioting rather than dancing, an impression matched by the lyrics' valiant sloganeering: "All the guys, and the signori/ Telling another false story", raged Karin, before declaring, brilliantly, that "liberals giving me a nerve itch". The accompanying video, by queer feminist porn director Marit Ostberg, featured cross-dressing cleaners, lesbian bikers and a woman urinating in the street. Suffice to say, José González would have his work cut out covering that one.
然而，他们最新的单曲《Full Of Fire 》只能从最基本的层面和其庞克乐风角度被认为是一首电子流行乐，听起来比Yazoo 乐队更像Throbbing Gristle 乐队的风格。这首歌急促而猛烈的节奏更像是暴乱的背景音乐而不是一支舞曲。歌词中勇士的号召也在透露出这样的意味，主唱Karin 在嘹亮地唱到“自由者于我心有戚戚焉”之前，咆哮地唱着：“所有的战士跟他们的夫人们/捏造了又一个事实”。该曲的MV由先锋女权主义类型的色情片导演Marit Ostberg拍摄，画面中有身着异装的清洁工人，骑着单车的女同性恋，甚至还有在街头小便的女士。可以说，José González会在该曲的基础上再翻唱自己的版本。
Although they haven't released a proper album since 2006's bewitching Silent Shout, the Knife's stock has continued to rise in the intervening years. This is partly the result of some impressive side-projects – the gothic domestic pop of Karin's acclaimed Fever Ray album; Olof's lucid techno excursions as Oni Ayhun; the ambitious, elemental and unexpectedly romantic score the pair wrote for Tomorrow In A Year, an opera about Charles Darwin – but also because the Knife's MO has been mimicked so frequently. There are now so many female-fronted electropop acts emerging from Scandinavia that it's becoming hard to keep track.
尽管继2006年发行广受欢迎的《Silent Shout》之后，刀子乐队再也出没有新的专辑，之后，他们的事业突飞猛进，也许是因为他们的作品常常被其他乐队模仿的缘故，在斯堪达纳威亚半岛地区，有太多的电子流行乐队（主唱为女性）不断登上音乐舞台，实在是让人眼花缭乱。还有一部分原因是刀子乐队也从事了一些副业工作，例如Karin的暗黑系本土流行乐专辑《Fever Ray》备受好评；Olof 以Oni Ayhun之名开始了轻松的电子巡演之旅；在专辑《Tomorrow In A Year》他们使用了雄心勃勃，风格质朴却浪漫得出乎人意料的伴奏；同时他们还参与一部关于查尔斯·达尔文的戏剧工作。
Helpfully, the Knife's startling new album Shaking The Habitual puts plenty of water between them and the pretenders to their throne. It proves that they can still write bizarre, inventive, oddly moving pop songs, but these are interspersed with passages of ominous drone lasting up to 20 minutes. Lyrically, the album takes aim at imperialist governments, phoney cultural constructs and families both royal and nuclear. It's never didactic, always poetic. But in a world where irony has superseded outrage and Carly Rae Jepsen tops critics' polls, you worry that such an explicitly political record – the inside sleeve features a satirical cartoon about extreme wealth – risks coming across as a little gauche.
然而，刀子乐队令人惊艳的新专辑《Shaking The Habitual 》让他们才华尽显，完爆那些追随者们的作品。他们通过新专辑证明自己仍有实力创作光怪陆离、风格独特，奇妙另类的流行歌曲，并且，在新作品里也有持续长达20多分钟阴郁的大段低鸣声。在歌词方面，该专辑瞄准了帝国主义政府，虚伪的文化建构以及皇室家庭和普通家庭。音乐所唱内容从不古板说教，反而充满诗意。然而在一个讽刺取代愤怒的世界，蹲妹Carly Rae Jepsen 广受质疑跟批评的同时，你会有点担心这样一份政治意味如此浓厚的专辑，用讲述超级富裕的卡通来凸显暗讽意义，无意中倾向了左派的观点。
"But I wonder, who are these people who think like that about music?" demands Karin. "We've done 14 or 15 interviews so far for this new album and only one of the journalists has been a woman – and that was for a feminist magazine. I think that speaks a bit for itself."
Surely, though, it's not just a few jaded male music hacks who think pop and politics shouldn't mix? Ask the vast majority of people why they listen to music and they'll say it's for escapism.
Karin 说道：“我有时候在想，究竟是哪些人会这样去看待音乐？为了新专辑，目前为止我们已经接受了大概14或15个左右的采访，其中只有一位是女性，还是某女权主义杂志的工作人员，我认为这个例子就很好地解释这一切。”
当然了，肯定不止某一小部分男性音乐发烧友们认为流行歌曲不应该跟政治搅在一起，但是如果问大部分人，他们都会回答自己听歌就是为了逃避现实。
"There's a narrative that culture or music should not have to do with politics," concedes Olof. "We are learned all the time to not think, and that of course comes through in many cultural workers. But I believe that it's in the music where you can really try out political alternatives and utopias. I have many friends who play around with these issues in their music – Planningtorock, for example, is doing that in really exciting ways – but the kind of vocabulary used around these artists is that it's pretentious or the production is not good enough. And that makes me think more about who is writing those things, as Karin said. It's not so easy to come through with a political message in music."
Olof Dreijer承担道 ："有人说文化或者音乐跟政治不应该扯上关系，我们一直被教唆放弃思考，幸而对于诸多文化工作者来说，这都不是问题，但我一直坚信，只有在音乐中，你才可以尝试政治的其他可能性乃至创造属于自己的乌托邦。我有很多朋友，比如说Planningtorock， 都在他们的音乐创作中尝试别出心裁地融合政治因素，但是对于这些艺术家们，大家只会评价他们自命不凡或者作品垃圾，这会让我更加深入思考，到底是谁在创作那些歌曲？就像Karin 所说的那样，想在音乐里传达政治理念，其实并不简单。"
For Shaking The Habitual to be a truly effective political statement, the Knife felt it was important that the music reflected the same anger as the lyrics, rather than relying on more traditional songwriting to act as a Trojan horse for sneaking in the odd subversive idea. Unquestionably, it's a challenging listen at times, but the band won't lose any sleep worrying about what people who came to the band through Heartbeats might make of a 10-minute industrial noise track called Fracking Fluid Injection.
因为《Shaking The Habitual 》这张专辑有力地表达了刀子乐队的政治诉求，他们认为在表达情绪方面，音乐本身跟歌词一样重要，依赖传统的歌曲创作方式就像是特洛伊木马一样，那些富有颠覆性的异见被精心地藏匿了起来。毫无疑问，不是每个人都可以立即接受新专辑的歌曲，但是刀子乐队丝毫不担心，那些因为因为听过《heartbeats》后慕名而来的歌迷们是否能听懂这张专辑里一首长达十多分钟的工业噪音单曲。
Pop music has always been about brokering a compromise between art and entertainment. Is accessibility something the Knife genuinely never considered, even when deciding on the ratio of conventional songs to experimental freakouts to put on Shaking The Habitual? "No, you just have to be true to your ideas and do the best out of them," says Karin. "You don't know what will happen, and that may be a bit scary, but it's important to not think about the reception."
流行音乐向来就是艺术与娱乐互相妥协的产物。刀子乐队在创作的过程中，难道就从未考虑过接地气的问题吗？ 哪怕是在新专辑《Shaking The Habitual》中，传统流行歌曲跟带有实验性质的先锋音乐各自所占的比例好像也并没有体现他们对于迎合普通大众口味的考虑。Karin 说：“我们不考虑这些，只是想要坦诚地表达出自己的想法，然后尽自己最大的努力去完成创作。可能我的歌确实有点另类，但是，不去担忧听众是否能够接受我们的创作其实很重要。”
Back in 2006, the Knife unnerved journalists by refusing to remove their long-beaked bird masks for interviews. This time around, they're not doing face-to-face interviews at all (this one's being conducted via Skype). "Onstage, of course we will be masked," assures Karin. Is this because they don't want anyone making snap judgments based on what they look like, or just because they enjoy dressing up?
回到2006年，刀子乐队因为拒绝采访中摘掉他们的长喙型鸟首面具而让记者们颇为不悦，这一次，从头到尾他们甚至都不予以进行面对面的沟通（此次采访是通过Skype进行的）。Karin 保证：“如果是在舞台上，我们一定会戴着面具的”。他们到底是因为不愿意让任何人基于他们的外表作出任何武断的评价呢？还是只是单纯喜欢把自己打扮起来？
"It's always fun to try out different roles," she replies. "I would like to quote [gender theorist] Judith Butler, who says, 'We are always in drag'. That has to do with the idea of authenticity: is there really any time when you are your true self? I would say that we're always playing a role. Even guys with guitars who sing about their emotions, they are playing a role of a person who does that."
“尝试不同的角色一直都是一件好玩儿的事儿。”Karin回复道，“我想引用一句性别理论研究学者Judith Butler 所说过的一句话‘我们一直都是衣衫褴褛’。这句话传达的意思主要是跟探讨真实性有关：你有没有那样一刻，是在真正地做自己？我的答案是，我们一直都在扮演着某种角色，即便那些手里拿着吉他唱着歌儿表达内心情绪的人们，他们也只是在扮演着做那些事儿的人的角色罢了。
'Sometimes I think I should get another job, and do this only for its own purpose. It's important to separate creative expression from making money' Karin Dreijer Andersson
“有的时候我在想，兴许我该换门职业，然后只是凭着纯粹的兴趣去坚持对音乐的追求。将富有创造性的自我表达跟赚钱分开来，是一件很重要的事情。”Karin Dreijer Andersson这样说。
The idea of authenticity in music is something that's been bothering the Knife ever since they started getting deeper into feminist theory (Olof signed up for a course at Stockholm University's department of gender studies, while Karin borrowed his reading list). "We've tried to find ways to implement what we have learned in queer theory," explains Olof. "We are really into criticising this idea that there are some sounds that people would consider more authentic than others. And the way we'd do that would be to get sounds that you don't really know where they come from. It could be a synthesised sound or a voice or even an animal. You don't really know about the origin."
自从刀子乐队开始更加深入地了解女权理论（Olof 在斯德哥尔摩大学的性别研究院报名了一项课程，Karin 找他要了一份阅读清单）后，关于音乐中的真实性的概念就一直在他们的脑海中挥之不去。“我们有尝试用一些方法去实践我们在酷儿理论中所学到的东西。”Olof 解释道。“我们真的很喜欢去批判一些想法，比如说，有的人觉得，某些声音就是比其他声音听起来更加真实。我们对此的反击就是，制造一些你根本不知道从哪里来的声音，比如说电脑合成处理过的，某些人声甚至动物的声音，你完全不知道声音是源自哪里。”
It still holds true for some people that if they can't picture anyone physically singing or playing an instrument, they can't relate to the music emotionally. "Well, we are constructed to like certain things," he continues. "We've been teaching a bit at this summer camp for teenage girls who want to make electronic music, and there we often talk about this idea of quality in music and what informs our ideas of what is supposed to be good and bad music. You know that music history is written by privileged white men, so we can ask ourselves how important it is to repeat their ideas." Bet they don't teach that at the Brit School.
对于某部分人来讲，是这样的。如果他们没有办法在脑海中描绘出人物歌唱或者演奏乐器的模样，对于音乐他们甚至不能产生情感上的共鸣。Olof 接着说：“嗯，我们天生就青睐具象的东西。夏令营的时候，我们遇到了一群想要学习如何创作电子音乐的年轻姑娘，我简单地指点了一下。在那里，我们经常讨论一些话题，例如音乐的质量以及是什么影响了我们对音乐质量好坏标准的评判。你知道的，音乐的历史是由那些白人贵族书写，所以，我们可以反问自己，继续他们的那一套玩法到底有多重要。”而这些话题的讨论，是不会英国的课堂上出现的。
It sometimes feels as if the Knife's feminist theory has an answer for everything. Don't like their new tune-free tracks? That's because you've been culturally conditioned to enjoy the decadent concept of melody. Yet it's also inspiring to hear a band talk with such intelligence about the ideas underpinning the consumption of music, rather than going with the flow in order to build a career. "I don't think you have the right to make a living out of your music-making," asserts Karin. "Sometimes I think I should get another job, and do this only for its own purpose. It's important to separate creative expression from making money."
有的时候刀子乐队容易给人一种感觉——他们的女权理论似乎可以解释一切。如果你表示对他们新出的无人声单曲表示欣赏无能的话，那只能说明你已经被原有文化所禁锢，只能欣赏日渐衰微的旋律。与此同时，跟这样一个充满机智的乐队聊天也是很令人激动的，比如聊到有关支持音乐消费的话题，他们不愿意为了追求事业的发展而随波逐流。Karin Dreijer Andersson强调：“我觉得大家没有权利仅仅依靠音乐产业而谋生。有的时候我在想，兴许我该换门职业，然后只是凭着纯粹的兴趣去坚持对音乐的追求。将富有创造性的自我表达跟赚钱分开来，是一件很重要的事情。 ”
Most bands don't make much money these days anyway, but Karin sees fresh dangers. "Bands are getting even more commercial because they are selling their music to advertisements and going on tours with big alcohol brands," she says. "That's really scary because it's hard to see how music and art can continue to develop or challenge itself within these new, very commercial frames."
现如今，大多数乐队都挣不了几个钱。Karin从中察觉到了新的问题，她说道“乐队变得越来越商业化，他们把歌卖给广告商，然后顶着巨大的酒类冠名商的品牌进行四处巡演。这是非常可怕的，因为对于音乐和艺术本身来说，在这种新颖而商业的束缚中，很难见其突破自身，更别说是有新的发展。”
Rest assured that the Knife's forthcoming tour – only their second ever – won't be sponsored by Absolut. Instead, true to the band's principles, their new stage show has been devised in collaboration with an all-female collective of choreographers and set designers. "It's important to show that it is possible to work feminist in the way you organise yourself," says Karin.
雷斯特保证刀子乐队接下来的这场巡演——也是有史以来的第二场，绝对不会接受任何商业性的赞助。并且，秉承刀子乐队的原则，他们和全部由女性组成的舞蹈编导和布景设计师合作，一起设计眼前这个崭新的舞台。“身体力行地去践行女权主义，不是没有可能，正式因为如此，我们的行动才充满意义。”Karin说道。
It remains to be seen whether the live show will be as eerie and fantastical as the one Andreas Nilsson designed for the Silent Shout tour in 2006, with the balaclavaed duo wielding fluorescent drumsticks. "That depends on what you find fantastic," says Karin. "I have a friend's friend who works on making live shows for big artists, and their idea of fantastic is having helicopters flying in onstage and so on." That doesn't give us much of an idea of what to expect. Will there be dancers? Lasers? Lesbian bikers and women urinating on the stage? Olof refuses to take the bait.
在2006年，Andreas Nilsson 为刀子乐队两人设计了Silent Shout 巡演，让他俩戴着兜帽露出眼睛，手中不断挥舞发出荧光的鼓棒。这一次的表演会延续上次的怪诞迷幻的风格吗？Karin是这样回答的：“这取决于你对怪诞迷幻的定义了。我有个朋友的朋友，为大牌艺术家工作，设计现场表演。他们觉得要把直升飞机搞来，盘旋在舞台上方类似这样的场景才算迷幻带感。”她的回答似乎没有透露太多具体信息。刀子乐队会安排舞者在上面给观众惊喜吗？还是镭射灯光？难道让女同性恋在舞台上面骑着单车甚至直接小便？对于我们的猜测，Olof拒绝上钩。
"It will," he deadpans, "feature at least 10 helicopters."
“ 惊喜会有的。比如至少十架直升机。”Olof面无表情地回答道。
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