How do you feel about Silent Shout now? Did you revisit it before speaking to me today?

KARIN: Yeah. I went through it very fast. I don't like listening to my old things. I mean, it was 12 years ago that we started to work on this, and it's about ideas I had then. So much has changed! Of course there are themes and things that still interest you, but I think everything you do gets dated. There are so many new things to explore. I’m not a nostalgic person.

OLOF: We made new versions for the Shaking the Habitual tour, and we were able to choose songs that we still felt something for. We made new versions, and those new versions I feel more happy with now. That's really nice, to able to develop them and give them new life. But sonically, [Silent Shout] is very much a production of very simple sounds. It's basically two synthesizers and the drum machine. And now it's such a huge difference; I mean [for Shaking the Habitual] we used a huge palette of sounds.

Shaking the Habitual was a new sound for The Knife, but it seemed that you wanted to convey your message in a different way as well.

OLOF: Quite a big difference with the Silent Shout time was we only dealt with the political subjects in theory, we didn't really practice anything.

KARIN: With Silent Shout we had all these political ideas and feminist ideas, but we were working with them in [only] music. A big, important difference is that, after that, we tried to infiltrate every part of our work with these ideas. For Shaking the Habitual we tried to work with an all female crew, and we really tried hard to find a female mastering engineer, female music technicians, and female video directors.

OLOF: I mean, we didn't even think about it at the time of Silent Shout and Deep Cuts—so all our video directors were male, and we didn't think about representation in any way. It’s a learning process, and we’ve learned to deprogram the things we have learned from hierarchical society.

It sounds like you became more aware of your privilege and the fact that you were in a position to do something about it. Silent Shout was a little abstract, but with Shaking the Habitual there was no mistaking what you believed in.

KARIN: When you get the opportunity to tour and you get the ability to speak in the media, it also gives you also a responsibility. I mean, it gives you power—and I think there are many, many artists who don't want to acknowledge that. And if you are a feminist artist, I don't see why you shouldn't adopt your ideas into your practice. I find that since we've been doing this in the Shaking the Habitual project, I am very interested in artists who put their ideas into practice. And not only like a secret, not only in theory. Like, having political lyrics.

So, in that context, do you think that Silent Shout was direct enough?



KARIN: No. I think you can never, never be direct enough. There's always something to strive for, to be as political as possible, because that really makes changes.

At the same time, one of the beautiful things about Silent Shout is that you find the politics as you go deeper into the lyrics. Like the song “Na Na Na,” which is about sexism and a woman who feels threatened.



KARIN: Yeah. I am into those kinds of lyrics also. I think what I'm trying to relay is that lyrics are not the only way an artist can be political.

Olof, you’ve been touring with Hiya wal Âalam these days. How has that experience been for you?

OLOF: It's been really great. Hiya wal Âalam is the project of Houwaida Hedfi, a Tunisian composer. We’ve been working together for the last three years, and this last year we started touring. I learned a lot and we're gonna continue this year finishing the album. I also coordinate music lessons and support a band from a refugee camp in Berlin called Oplatz, and their band is called Lomnava Refugees and Friends. It’s a day-to-day activity. They play reggae and hip-hop and communicate their message about refugee rights and their experience of mistreatment as refugees.

What else are you working on these days, Karin?

KARIN: I have made music for theater play that is touring in Sweden now, called Vahák, which means violence in Sami. And I am working in my studio on something. I'm continuing in other shapes.

So not as Fever Ray?



KARIN: I don't know yet. We will see what it will be.