This fascinating record shadows an apparently murderous concept with more than enough themic ambiguity, musical invention and sly humor, to make repeat listens essential, if not exactly desirable.
The silence is broken by "The Boat Was My Friend" flickering to life with a pronounced sonic electricity; as if hot stones were being dropped onto an overamplified guitar. Then waves of cello combine with furtive percussion to suggest trapped energy, almost untethered. A female voice wordlessly chants something akin to a lullaby, but the feeling is much less hush little baby than cradle will fall. There is little relief ahead as this entire record is steeped in unease. Some ancient force is getting loose and the likely results are to be both hidden and brutal.
The plucked bass notes of "Ocean out of wood" briefly conjure a brilliant and avant-swinging Nordic jazz.. er, ..odyssey, but this is a red herring as "My feet, over there" with it's grinding pace, inhuman ripping and excruciating stuttering sounds, evokes an appalling smothering of hope. In isolation this is a mighty piece, but is ill-placed and might even have been better as a separate 7 inch. Next, the truly unforgetable "Easy on the bones" is the sound of something desperately wrong. In the first series of Twin Peaks, a terror was conveyed by the needle stuck at the end of a record as the incarnation of Bob invades Laura Palmer's house. Svarte Greiner echoes that scene but takes the audio-horror a step further with a repetitive sawing sound as gentle as lapping waves. Waves in a sea of blood and bone fragment, that is.
Several tracks feature a pure, faint, female voice. This keeps a necessary sense of listenable normality to all the ghastly scraping, eerie rustling, startled bird calls, horrible footsteps, suspenseful door openings, and strangled surprises. We feel unease, but could we recognize the long-forgotten scent of human sacrifice, execution, and ship burials if we heard it?
Despite its overtly gothic organ, tinkling bells, synth, stuck needle and vinyl hiss, "The black dress" somehow works. Whether this is a Buffalo Bill sewing machine scenario, a tender necrophilial closeness, or a silly dark wedding, depends upon your imagination. It also features a similar sense of footsteps ripping through long grass that are a central feature of "An ordinary hike." "Ullsokk" is furtively squelchy with more of the pure chanting bringing to my mind either a nearby victim or Lady Macbeth figure, before "The dinner table" introduces a rhythm that Martin Hammett would have enjoyed working on, and maintains an emerging ceremonial atmosphere. Thankfully the ambiguity isn't shattered: Were those dinner bells calling cannibal spirits? Is there to be a sacrifice? Is this scary, or funny? That's a gorgeous voice. What's he building in there?
"Final sleep" sounds like a standard horror shovel scene, though the plane passing overhead smashes any ancient spiritual notions, while it also emphasizes the idea of the proximity of all this to normal life. Snoring sounds are drowned by an operatic peace and soothing swathes of which The Dead Texan would approve. Is that rain, a bottle being emptied, blood or piss?
As David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti ably demonstrate, horror can be brought into sharp relief when set against the beautiful and the bland. Like a shiny, pert blonde and blue-eyed Christian woman casually whispering "We should nuke Afghanistan". The Moors Murderers ( Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) made audio tapes of the torture and murder of their victims partly for, in particular, Brady's later arousal. Nevertheless, I imagine that "Knive" somehow isn't an ideal music for any fictional or factual serial killing psychotic fiends. Consider Fred West who, with his devoted wife by his side, prefered something bouncy and jolly to drown the screams. During his happy decades of abuse, torture, dismemberment and murder in the cellar of his terraced house at Cromwell Street in Gloucester, Fred loved to blast out "Yeh Yeh" by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and I bet he whistled that pop ditty the day he hanged himself in Winson Green prison. Utterly harmless, but horribly apt when cast against his crimes:
We'll play a melody and turn the lights down low / So that no-one can see / We gotta do that, we gotta do that / We gotta do that, we gotta do that / And there'll be no one else alive in all the world 'cept you and me / Yea, yea, yea, yea, yea / Yea, yea, yea, yea / Pretty baby I never knew such a thrill / Just thought I'd tell you, because I'm trembling still / But pretty baby, I want you all for my own / I think I'm ready to leave those others alone....
Despite a weird recognition factor perhaps brought on from too many Hammer Horror films, I prefer to think that the sounds on Knive which seem to depict the slow emergence of a brutal horror and a subsequent peace, couldn't possibly be what I imagine they are. What's more, how could I recogize that which I've never heard? Either they must have been part of some dream, an inherited genetic unconscious, or the snoring was tryptophan induced and the whole thing was some pro-turkey vegetarian art-terrorism. Just in time for Christmas.
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