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The Knife - Tomorrow, in a Year

Sneakily got hold of this album in the new year, having really loved the 2006 album "Silent Shout", which saw the Knife, move to darker more brooding sounds whilst still retaining the catchiness and melody of their earlier two releases. Similaly I completley fell for Karin's solo album under the Fever Ray moniker, which for me, provided both one of the best albums and live shows of 2009.

So the Knife return with their most strange and bizzare release yet. "Tomorrow, in a Year" see's the Swedish siblings Olaf and Karin Driejer collaborate with Mt Sims and Planningtorock to produce this two disc 16 track Electro Opera. Yep. OPERA.
And if the premise of it being an Opera wasn't bizzare enough, it had to be one based on Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Of course. it HAD to be.

I always love it when artist's take a massive creative turn, and this is one big turn. I can't imagine this will be every ones cup of coco, especially people more fond of their ealier output. Although you can tell it's still the Knife, it's like nothing they've done before, taking away much of the standard structure, rythm and pop elements of past and adding more elements of Drone, Noise and ambient aswell as Operatic mezzo-soprano vocals. Although the record gets more "normal" in the later half, with more of Karin's voice being present (albiet still fucked up with vocoders and octave effects) The overall result is a darker, experimental, and slighly scary in places...

Personally, I dig it.


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TANDANORI YOKOO

I recently came across the amazing poster work of 1960's graphic artist, Tandanori Yokoo, who's use of collage, bright colours, intresting layout and slight psychedelic feel caught my eye.

taken from wikipedia, the lazy mans source of all knowledge...

"Tadanori Yokoo (横尾忠則, Yokoo Tadanori) (born 1936, 27 June in Hyogo Prefecture) is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter.

Tadanori Yokoo (pronounced "yoko-o"), born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.

In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been (unfairly) described as the "Japanese Andy Warhol" or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo's complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original. By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 "Word & Image" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years later MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work organized by Mildred Constantine.[1] Yokoo collaborated extensively with Shuji Terayama and his theater Tenjo Sajiki. He has also starred as a protagonist in Nagisa Oshima's film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.

In 1981 he unexpectedly "retired" from commercial work and took up painting. His career as a fine artist continues to this day with numerous exhibitions of his paintings every year, but alongside this he remains fully engaged and prolific as a graphic designer."