How music is found. The Knife, Fever Ray and Oni Ayhun

I was late to this but better than never.

Listening to Deborah Harry on Desert Island Discs, one of her tracks was When I grow up by Fever Ray. The 30 seconds they played intrigued me, so I went to the website to see who it was. 

And found Fever Ray, bought the album, the live album and mix eps and was obviously hooked - the voice, the music, the tone.

So I went back and found The Knife albums - Silent Shout is a nice dance electronics, but with my eclectic preferences liked the 'opera' Tomorrow, in a year even more.

The recent release of a preview track from the new album mentioned that the male half had released some EPs as Oni Ayhun. These are available from various download sites (if you go to his website you will be directed to a shop where they are sold in Euros for less than the Australian iTunes site - not sure about other areas http://oniayhun.com/OAR001.html). They are quite weird but wonderful minimal techno and well worth the asking price.

The new album Shaking the habitual is said to be a change in direction, and the advance track Full of fire combines the minimal madness of Oni with some full beats, more distorted edgy vocals and amusing changes that keep you onboard for the 10 minutes. I have preordered the album.

Which arrived today - comments will follow

Well - it probably fits in with comments across here about the length possible in downloads - it is a massive 96 minutes long (over the double album length). Except for a couple of short pieces 4:30 is the shortest and 8/13 clock in at over 6 and there is a 19 minute instrumental which could be Oni Ayhun. Could it have been editied down, probably - but there is something rather quixotic about the whole thing - you can hear the various strands of their careers coming together, with less focus on the melodic and more on the jarring and confronting - but with sweet spots. It is an album which will take time to absorb and may never like - rather like recent Scott Walker albums.