Pitchfork

Photos by Karin Dreijer Andersson

I'll bake the cake, you round up the candles: November 2009 marks the 150th birthday of Charles Darwin's epochal evolution text On the Origin of Species. And who better to commemorate the occasion than, okay, the Knife! With an opera?? Next thing you'll tell me Adam and Eve aren't actually my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.

According to their website, the Knife's Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson have been enlisted to write both the music and libretto (i.e., words) for Danish theater group Hotel Pro Forma's upcoming production Tomorrow, in a Year. The piece is set to debut in Copenhagen in November 2009, and takes as its inspiration Darwin's thoughts on evolution, change, transformation, and mutation.

Thanks to Shea Earle for the heads up.



Quoth the press materials, the production "uses Darwin's way of observing and describing the world. Change as a process and the interrelationship of all things is the basic material of the performance...Tomorrow, in a Year points to evolution as a field of possibilities, where nature unfolds its great liberality, finding niches and new paths. The musical and visual components of the performance are shown as fragments, as parts of the world that are uncovered and studied. A recognisable sequence emerges, only to mutate and change into a number of subsequent species. There is a development from preliminaries to totality to renewed change." Sounds...artsy.

As for the band's contributions, "The Swedish music group the Knife creates completely new compositions that challenge the conventional conception of opera. The form is experimental and exploratory. The music is written for three singers who come from different backgrounds: electronica pop, classical opera, and performance. They are the protagonists of the performance, displaying three ways of experiencing the world. They are the spokesman, the organiser, and the one who acts. They are structure, sensation, form, time, and thought." Hey, as long as I can dance to it, count me in.



The Knife's site notes that brother Olof is presently in the Amazon doing field recordings of animals, fish, and plants, while sister Karin is credited with taking the intriguing-looking publicity stills for Tomorrow, in a Year you see here. Huh, looks strangely familiar...

In other news, Karin has an album due early next year under the Fever Ray banner. Also, the Knife are kinda weird.