The Knife and Fever Ray: if I had a heart...

Edited by Alice Kundalini - She Spread Sorrow

I couldn't even say how many times I've listened to Silent Shout, the celebrated and wonderful album by The Knife. Nor could I say in how many different situations the notes of Marble House have kept me company, or how many different emotions they have soundtracked. Just as there is no number that could quantify the times I have danced, more or less melancholically, while watching the video for Pass This On. I don't think there's a playlist on my Spotify that doesn't include a track by The Knife or Fever Ray. This obviously has to do with personal taste (I have an almost obsessive passion for Dreijer Andersson's voice), but also with a skill I recognise in very few artists: the ability to make something simple and pop that has substance, aesthetics, taste and an incredible artistic light, in which you breathe emotions and visions that are utterly refined and far from the mainstream.

The Knife, brother and sister, who have not released anything since 2013, have always been elusive and far from the spotlight, even that of live performance. Here is one of my favourite videos of one of their rare performances, goosebump-inducing to say the least.

Fever Ray, Dreijer Andersson's solo project, initially carried on this "tradition", then chose to expose herself more with her latest work, Plunge. Even so, she remains about as far as you can get from the common image of a "pop star", even though she is certainly among the greatest electropop artists of today (in my taste the greatest, along with Bjork, of course).

One of the most striking things about Fever Ray's first album (self-titled) is its link to the north. You can breathe in the cold of the Swedish forests (her homeland), and feel the heart of the woods pulsing with its secrets and mysteries. Indeed, the track If I had a heart (one of my favourites) was used as the soundtrack for the television series Vikings (which is, incidentally, wonderful) and no choice could have been more fitting. Here is the original video, in which the atmosphere of the album is at its most palpable: dark, pagan, introspective.

In 2017, Plunge came out, in digital format only. A completely different image, a reference to mental disturbance and a theme very different from the earlier ones, linked to sexuality, in terms of political and social revolution. Another masterpiece.

So, if I had a heart... Oh, the heart is there all right, and you can feel it, and, dear Drejeer, I doubt anyone can listen to you without feeling it beat together with yours, in your world that is only apparently cold, icy and dark. Your empty streets are the ones where I too love to walk, and I am sure that in that non-place we often meet in the magic of a sound.

Black Pills is a column that does not set out to teach anything. There are books, articles and manuals that deal with the biographies of artists, films and works of art in a detailed and exhaustive way. This is not one of those cases. The black pills are small glimpses of cultural and artistic landscapes, at times very broad, which offer the chance to explore themes that do not entirely belong to mass culture, but move along other channels and other circuits. In a world where the choice is often limited to what is defined, in the broadest sense, as pop, I highly recommend taking a few pills of a different colour and perhaps discovering something new, which in some cases, as in mine, can stay with you for the rest of your life.