Seeds (Remixes) [feat. Mt. Sims] - EP

With Tomorrow, in a Year, the Knife took one of 2010's most disorienting hard lefts. Their opera about the life of Charles Darwin was many things-- foreboding, incoherent, intermittently brilliant-- but a logical follow-up to Silent Shout it was certainly not. As a display for lunatic high-art ambition, it was kind of breathtaking. As a Knife album, it was bewildering. There were about 25 minutes of revelatory music buried in its back half, but you had to wade through hair-raising atonal mezzo-soprano shrieking and grinding sheets of industrial noise to make it there, not a journey for the faint-hearted.

The project threw the Knife's storyline off balance in ways that have yet to settle, which makes this two-song EP a gentle clarification of where the Swedish duo stands in 2011. "Seeds" was Tomorrow, in a Year's one relatively straightforward club song, a pulsing house-music track that the Knife inverted with bowed-cymbal sounds and odd bursts of opera singing. Along with the 11-minute "Colouring of Pigeons" and "The Height of Summer", "Seeds" hinted at the luminous fusion Tomorrow, in a Year could have been. The two remixes here, from two very different producers, find clever and opposite ways to smuggle the Knife back into the club. Portable and Bodycode are two pseudonyms for the same brainy, restless producer: Alan Abrahams, a South African-born DJ whose music rubs up against the tension between the intellectual and the visceral. Shinedoe, meanwhile, is a deep-house DJ who runs Intacto Records and rubs shoulders with dance titans Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos.

Shinedoe's aesthetic might read like a mismatch for the Knife's. But her Mediterranean party sensibilities actually work as an advantage here. She lights up the duo's chilly hauteur with sensuous warmth, pouring on glittering synths and soap-bubble drums like so much dancefloor foam. Swedish singer/songwriter Jonathan Johansson's wispy singing-- "Seeds immersed in/ S [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| alt water/ In a tank of/ Melting snow" is the only instantly recognizable element. Abrahams' version is darker and sleeker, with elements from the original-- the mezzo-soprano "ahs", the heat-lightning soft bells-- strafing by like rain-smeared headlights past a mist of moody minor-key synth pads. He retains the song's queasy menace, and produces something murmuring and insistent against Shinedoe's cheerfully bludgeoning flash. Seeds is a necessarily slight EP, a small gesture in between larger projects, but for those left unsettled by the uncertainty of Tomorrow, in a Year, it's a welcome little dispatch.