In his review of Swedish electro duo the Knife's 2006 meisterverk Silent Shout, Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik waxed ecstatic about how Olof Dreijer worked his sister Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals through sickly FX, making her nursery rhyme delivery sound like it was coming from the bottom of a slimy well. But Dreijer's crude palette of old-school electro/techno sounds managed to exert a feeling of anxiety all on their own, picking under the scab of never-ending 1980s retro-kitsch until pus bubbled up from underneath. Now a little more than a year later, Mute repackages the album with a DVD featuring a spectacle of a live performance from Stockholm in 2006, where the visual aesthetic mines a similar vein of nostalgia for the heebie-jeebies that out-of-date technology can induce, plus 11 music videos and an extra CD containing the audio track from said live performance. For those of us who bought the record the first time around, it's basically your chance to buy a new Knife DVD, and if you're a fan, it's pretty much worth owning two copies of the same CD.
The DVD, Silent Shout: An Audio Visual Experience, begins in an inky blankness broken by audience screams, as the emergency alarm bleeps and astringent arpeggios of "Pass This On" are slowly assembled. When the duo are finally revealed-- androgynous in what look like janitor's uniforms and bathed in cerulean light, with Olof jerking at his machinery and Karin pulling nervous mime moves-- they come off like a sinister cross between Devo's unsatisfied twitches and Daft Punk's studied roboticisms. Backed by exploding neon lights and arena-sized video projections, when Karin begins snapping her fingers and awkwardly swaying during "You Make Me Like Charity", she looks like an android go-go dancer or a space alien who has intercepted transmissions of late 80s episodes of "Club MTV". Even the human element of the Knife's performance feels artificial, some approximation of humanity knocked together by machines that's as intensely unnerving as their records.
An Audio Visual Experience isn't so much a concert film as a 50-minute music video that's been extensively edited and tarted up after the fact, with enough quick cuts at jarring angles to feel as epileptic as the video games you can hear in the band's music. Orchestrated by Andreas Nilsson and Ossian Ekman, it's as decadent as cyberpunk Weimar cabaret. Rough-hewn digital imagery blurs into repurposed Super-8 home video, simple geometric paterns flare into life and spin across the screen like a perverted planetarium's laser light show, and throughout there's that pervasive unease. Like Boards of Canada with the queasiness cranked to 10, all those smudgy faces from someone else's home movies, pixilated effects from the days of 8-bit computers, and other visual tropes you half-remember from growing up mingle with the band's sour, often operatic black forest overhaul of synth-pop to radiate discomfort. An Audio Visual Experience isn't wholly successful; parts of it veer uncomfortably toward the feeling that you could be watching old Nine Inch Nails performances with the sepia-tinting replaced by deep blues and purples. But there are enough indelible images-- the Atari snowflakes that begin falling during "Heartbeats" for instance-- to give it more replay value than your average multi-angle concert film.
The 11 music videos (and one short film) included on the DVD have a broader range and a lighter touch than the concert's unrelenting Grand Guignol. Culled from across the band's discography, they flit from the whimsical domestic scene (literally) sketched out in "N.Y. Hotel", to more crude CGI and home movies for "Heartbeats", to a heavily eyeliner-ed take on "You Take My Breath Away" that would almost feel like a parody of 80s revivalism if the band didn't really sell those leather jackets with ostentatious shoulder pads. "Handy Man", with its hyperreal colors and talking hammers, likewise feels like a loving pisstake of the pounding cheese that Euro-pop has been crapping out for decades and that you can still see weekly in U.S. gay clubs, and the dancing skeletons of a second take on "You Take My Breath Away" are so bargain basement that they briefly made me nostalgic for those charmingly crappy "psychedelic" computer animations of early 90s rave videos.
And despite its forward-thinking rep, the Knife is clearly a pretty nostalgic band, too. As two twentysomething Swedes, these 80s and 90s visual signifiers are the broth their brains were boiled in while growing up. The siblings' enduring fascination with the evocative powers of primitive electronics, whether musical or visual, combined with the florid gothic streak that bloomed on Silent Shout, has resulted in a pretty rich stew. While the inclusion of the original album is superfluous and the second disc capturing the music of the live Stockholm performance is pointless, Silent Shout Deluxe Edition is worth picking up for its near pitch-perfect visual rendering of the band's appeal-- creepy but seductive images from the decade's most unexpected purveyors of bad dreams.
