The Knife played in Los Angeles on Saturday night, their third and final North American show for this tour, and from what I can gather, for the forseeable future. Apparently, their intricate and complicated stage design is too much of a pain and to haul from city to city, and they don't have ELO's budget to hire the semi-trailers. But I get the sneaking suspicion that they’ve got an ulterior, and probably not too pragmatic, motive as well for their abbreviated tour. After Saturday, it’s relatively easy to consider the Knife in person as not so much a concert in the traditional sense as much as a work of performance art—singular, unchanging (the setlist was exctly the same as it was here—and stay to read Matthew’s excellent take on the show, if you haven’t already) and not designed for mass reproduction. More specifically, I’ll offer that a Knife show like the one I saw is not one that can be enjoyed in the manner of a typical concert (although not even close to the extent of this elitist interpretation). The differences are subtle, but important.

First, there are limited perspectives to watch the performance, if you’re looking to “get” the whole spectacle—after last night, I’ve decided that the best position is in front of the stage, no more than 15 degrees to the left or right (we were pretty far off to the side, standing against a wall). The reason for this viewer specificity is that there is a scrim that hangs in front of the entire stage, and all manner of animations are projected onto it—some that obscure Karin and Olof, some that border them, and some that just reify the distance between performer and viewer. Behind them is a curtain, onto which a second projector casts a different set of images. I’m almost positive that these two projections are designed to interact with one another, creating a transfixing sense of Cartesian depth. I think watching it from the side we were on was like looking at a ViewMaster with one eye closed, if you get the gist. Our position on the side, however, didn’t stop me from gazing in wonder at the intricate spectacle created in front of me—the front and back projections suspended the performance in a translucent cube, with imagistic boundaries surrounding Karin and Olof, attacking every one of their senses and demanding a response.

My girlfriend Forrest (plug; we also met this guy there) helped me come to the conclusion that the ideal venue for the Knife to put on this kind of show would be an old-time movie theatre—where the very back of the viewing area is higher than the stage, and gradually slopes down, stadium-style. This allows everyone to see everything, instead of craning over the heads of the other people in the crowd. Karin and Olof use almost every vertical inch of the thirty to forty-foot stage, which puts them at the very bottom, where they often get obscured by crowd heads. There were people around me who couldn’t see Karin at all, which is a travesty, because she was absolutely resplendent when she’d back away from the microphone and gently dance for a minute, as if she would throw off the balance of the performance if she just let it all loose like she probably wanted to.

But this is not to say that I failed to enjoy even a second of the show, not in the slightest. I’m pretty biased, though, because my affection for the Knife runs extremely deep. They’ve released two of the best (and consequently, my favorite) singles of the decade thus far, in “Heartbeats” and “We Share Our Mother’s Health,” which show their amazing skill in wringing heartfelt humanity and sincerity out of the most seemingly sterile instruments, while dispensing with any traditional notions of sexuality, romance, or passion. They’ve pushed so far into the inhuman that they’re able to see and comment on mortal things that most people simply glide over. When I listen to the synthetic steel drums, or the thrumming synthesizers, or Karin’s infinitely malleable and guileless voice, I get a sense that there’s something in the Knife’s music that will always be significantly out of reach, and what I’m hearing and loving is just the remotest tip of what continues infinitely.



Saturday night, they were about an hour late hitting the stage, and then they only played for barely over an hour. But this seemed much more carefully calculated than a simple diva move. There’s an aura that surrounded this show like none other I’ve seen—partially because of the external hype, mostly because of the limited performance run—that turned the hour between the original start time and the actual show start into a ramp of energy that culminated when the lights went down and the initial rumblings of “Pass This On” started, leading to about half of the crowd screaming a countdown to the start of the song. The animations started predictably—a series of lines drew diamond shapes that grew increasingly complex throughout the song, until they ended in a complete abstraction by the end. But it was “We Share Our Mother’s Health” that made the most effective use of the cube projection format. Karin sang and Olof pounded his imaginary drums as a seizure-inducing and nearly violent torrent of colorful, animated images blasted across both screens. It was about the most contrary set of imagery for the music I could imagine, but after a moment (when I stopped jumping around for long enough to actually watch), it started to make sense. Karin and Olof’s costumes, consisting of stark black clothing and masks, with bright neon orange outlines around their eyes, mouths, noses, and ears, highlighted their sensory organs to a startling degree, initially making them look vaguely simian, but gradually causing me to realize (again, with the helpful assistance of my girlfriend) that the Knife’s M.O. is partially devoted to the processes and limitations of absorption through the senses. What is gained and lost when we’re limit ourselves to the body as a means of understanding life? What does “primal” really mean? How does a silent shout sound?

Elsewhere during the set, the frontal image attack slowed down, and the visual stimuli was limited to an oval-portrait shaped disembodied face that hovered ominously behind the band on stage left. During “Marble House,” it was a distorted male face that occasionally sung along, but turned into a skull by the end of the song, like the very last shot of Norman Bates in Psycho (see the pic above, sorta). The skull, with human eyes no less, stuck around for the majority of rest of the set, but it was two non-skull-related moments that I’ll remember most. The first one came during “Heartbeats,” a song which, if you’re not affected by its sentiment on a visceral level, especially when you’re in the presence of someone you love, I just don’t know what to do with you. The frontal scrim was blank for the song until the wonderful bridge, when animated snowflakes started cascading down from the top. I gulped, and got a little choked up—it was a perfectly childlike way to express visually the wonder that the song creates aurally. The second moment wasn’t as potent, but it was nonetheless quietly stunning. During “From Off to On,” what looked like raindrops on a windshield gently rolled down the scrim, creating a surreal trompe l’oeil effect that made my mouth drop open a bit. Their encore was an extended version of “Like a Pen,” and when the lights came on afterward, a collective sigh rose from a small portion of the crowd, who were no doubt disappointed at the show’s early conclusion. But for the majority of us, there was enough stimuli contained in the 60 or so minutes of the set to account for 10 normal shows.