THE KNIFE

A snowfield, near a forest, round dawn, somewhere in Sweden. The Knife are art-directing the shoot for their new press photographs. They are wearing long black coats, long black wigs and masks that make them look like crows. Why? If we could choose not to do any photos at all, we would, says Karin Dreijer Andersson. But its quite impossible. Because I do not think it has anything to do with the music. So we use the photos now to show what our music looks like. It is very cold and dark and suggestive maybe, says Olof Dreijer of the duos new "image". We feel like that if we had been there with our plain faces, that would destroy the illusion of the music. So we tried to dress up as the music. Occult and dark but at the same time, funny.

This is the world of The Knife: precise, particular, dark, occult, funny-peculiar, funny-ha-ha. This Swedish brother-and-sister duo work mostly on their own in splendid isolation; they release music on their own label, licensing it to selected partners around the world, so they have to answer to no one. They have only ever played live once because theyre still wrestling with the old conundrum of how to present "computer music" in an interesting way on the stage. Within the steely electronic pop of their last album Deep Cuts lurked songs about womens rights and the duty of good citizens to pay their taxes. For their last set of pictures they dressed as gymnasts.

The Knife don´t do anything by half, and they don´t do anything twice. Compromise is the enemy, repetition a cop-out.