Karin Dreijer Anderson fronts up Fever Ray at Electric Picnic – and with a theme that is rarely addressed in pop music, writes JIM CARROLL
IT’S A solo run which hasn’t ended yet. Last year, Karin Dreijer Andersson released an album as Fever Ray. Up to that point, she was better known as one half of The Knife, a Swedish duo whose crisp electronic pop and icy, pristine electronica had already produced some audacious, well-received albums.
With her Knife collaborator and brother Olof elsewhere, Dreijer Andersson took flight as Fever Ray. There were some familiar Knife strokes to the album’s fabric – melancholic, haunting atmospherics and moody electronic, folky tendencies in the main – but there were also some rarely spotted ideas teased out between striking lyrics about dishwasher tablets and caring for house plants.
Recorded after the birth of her second child, Dreijer Andersson used Fever Ray as a way to write about motherhood, a theme seldom addressed in pop.
“I never came across that much music about the experience of motherhood,” she says. “It’s something which is quite rare to find. When you start to read about female artists who are mothers and you know what they’ve gone through, you approach their lyrics in a different way. You can find hints about what’s going on and the pressures of being an artist and mother. I wanted to reflect on what happens when you have kids because it also makes you think about your own childhood.” Another difference between Fever Ray and The Knife was the relish with which Dreijer Andersson embraced gigging. The Knife had been famously reticent about live shows – her brother Olof has always displayed considerable apathy towards going onstage – with just a 2006 tour to their credit.
It has been a different story with Fever Ray. Dreijer Andersson worked with visual artist and long-time collaborator Andreas Nilsson to produce a stage-show which matched the beguiling oddness of the album.
Filling the room with dry ice and lighting the stage with lasers, Dreijer Andersson and her bandmates would appear and disappear out of the gloom clad in ghoulish masks and clobber. It was a show which sent many poor mad-out-of-it teenage ravers in the dance shed at last year’s Oxegen – one of the most incongruous and daft festival bookings of all time – running for their mammies.
“I like the idea of using the whole room when it comes to the show because I think it gives a different experience for artist and audience,” says Dreijer Andersson. “I don’t think I’d ever been to that theatrical a show before. What we did with The Knife in 2006 was a very good start for what what I ended up doing with Fever Ray. It allowed me to try out ideas for the stage show, though I think the Fever Ray show is a little less high-tech.” Dreijer Andersson’s inspiration for the costumes and masks came from an unlikely source. “I was influenced by the culture of the Sami people who live in the north of Sweden. They’re seen as a minority in the country, nomads who make their living looking after reindeers.
“When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the really strong colours of their clothing and I wanted to wear the same clothes. When it came to the show, I wanted to bring in some of those cultural elements and I think Andreas succeeded. It’s very colourful, it’s very direct, it’s very thought-provoking.” Dreijer Andersson believes they’ve been shunned by some of her fellow countryfolk. “They’re people who’ve been oppressed by the Swedish government and that’s something many Swedes are ashamed about. The government would like them to be part of society and send their kids to schools, but they want to keep their life the way it has always been. It hasn’t really been solved.” However, there are sides to Swedish society which she is keen to praise.
“What’s best about Sweden is that you have the mechanisms to enable both parents to share reponsibility for raising children. The government pays for the father or mother to stay home with the kids. It makes us more equal and it makes it possible and easier for me as a mother to work and also raise my family, which I know is not as common elsewhere. I couldn’t do what I do otherwise.” It hasn’t all been Fever Ray for Dreijer Andersson in the past while.
Earlier this year, The Knife released Tomorrow, In A Day, an ambitious double-album of opera arias based on the life and times of Charles Darwin. The album began life when Danish group Hotel Pro Forma commissioned the duo to write the music for a performance piece with dance which they wanted to call an opera.
Problem number one: neither Dreijer Andersson nor her brother knew anything about opera. “Olof went to the opera, I didn’t go,” she laughs. “But we did listen to a lot of opera. It was a very difficult experience for us. Opera is very focused. Opera singers learn to sing in a very certain way and there’s no space for improvision or experimentation.
“What interested me and what was the biggest challenge when we worked with the opera singer Kristina Wahlin was how we were supposed to write for her.
Kristina had never sang without notes before and we don’t write music in that way so there was a communication problem in the beginning. When it started to move and we began to understand how she worked and she began to trust us, some fantastic things happened.” She’s unsure right now about future plans for Fever Ray. There’s a bunch of live shows (including a date at the Electric Picnic) to come and that’s it for now. “I don’t know about another Fever Ray record. For now, it’s going to be The Knife and I am also going to write music for a theatre play. We’ve already started to work on something nice-ish for The Knife. I don’t know what it will be, but we have started. And after playing live with Fever Ray, I’m definitely open to working with more people and different instruments.”
Fever Ray play the Electric Picnic, Stradbally, Co Laois, on September 5
LISTEN: If I had a Heart; When I Grow Up
YOUTUBE: tinyurl.com/be9fyq
