Dear reader and listener,

Does life have a sound? Is it possible to put evolution to

music?
When you venture into the music of Tomorrow, in a Year,
you might get an idea. This is an artful interpretation and
a sonic investigation of evolution, suggesting that life does
not sound like serene divine harmonies in a clear
hierarchy, but rather like an ever changing and
expanding, slow motion jacuzzi of rhythms, voices,
instruments fighting to reproduce, mutate, adapt.
These 90 minutes of music by The Knife and their
collaborators Mt.Sims and Planningtorock are sparked by
the pioneer of natural selection Charles Darwin and his
revolutionary evolutionary findings and writings in his
book On The Origin of The Species. First published in 1859
and based on the discoveries he made on his journey to
Galapagos Islands from 1831-1836, aboard the good ship
HMS Beagle.
These 90 minutes span the life of the earth, from the
earliest geology, amoebas and insects, passing the
dinosaurs, arriving at man, maybe looking further on. And
they tell the story of Darwin and his ability to upset the
established order and wrestle the ownership of creation
from God.
This is development of sound and music as a battle
between ideas, conquering the constantly changing
moment. Hear the simple bleeps, glitches and tremolo of
earliest life. Listen to the desperate high frequency
twitters and the gut wrenching bass bellows fighting to
adapt, not die on “Variation of Birds”. Inhabit the slow,
violent, wriggling symphony of life maintaining some of its
characteristics, swiftly discarding of others on “Schoal
Swarm Orchestra”.

In the beginning there was the Danish theatre

experimentalists Hotel Pro Forma and their idea of making
an opera about Darwin. They contacted me in early 2008
to advise on potential modern composers. I suggested The
Knife, since they’ve been the single most curious and
thought provoking musical acquaintance I’ve made in
years.
The Swedish siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof
Dreijer are able to mix criticism of capitalism and
patriarchy, exploitation of the human flesh, desperation of
popular culture and mental claustrophobia into spiritually
haunting, physically seductive and darkly visionary
expansions of what synthetic, sometimes anthemic pop
can be. Expansions that made room for new beings, weird,
sad, beautiful entities, not only in the shape of the duo’s
disfigured vocals, but also in the ever changing, home-
built mutations of synthetic sound.
Hotel Pro Forma got The Knife aboard, and what followed
was an experimental process, where the different creative
parties – composers, choreographer, costume designer
and set designer – worked separately and only three and a
half month before take off started collaborating. And it all
culminated at the world premiere of the Darwin opera
Tomorrow, in a Year at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen,
Denmark on the 2nd of September 2009 – which you, dear
reader and listener, can now experience as a musical
piece in its own, well deserved right.

The musical process kicked into gear in March 2008, and

on an early stage Karin and Olof Dreijer decided to
puncture their own comfortable familiar bubble and open
up to a more collective, more evolutionarily friendly
structure with the English musician/singer Planningtorock
and the American musician/singer Mt.Sims as creative
family members. As well as engaging with the Danish
mezzo soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme, the Danish
actress Laerke Winther and the Swedish pop singer
Jonathan Johanson for the vocal parts. This forced all to
migrate outside their safety zones, questioning their every
decision along the way, coming up with new answers. A
process drenched in the consciousness that music can
evolve like organisms, through influence, reaction,
adaptation, diversification.
During their research the collaborators experienced opera
performed live for the first time – Verdi’s Aïda – but this
didn’t reduce their profane approach to the art of making
it. They studied concrete music – music made from only
real life sounds, such as recordings of nature – atonal
music, compositions for modern dance, as well as
interpretations of Darwin.
“I enjoyed trying to find the musicality in Darwin’s
writings”, says Karin Dreijer Andersson. “Using his words
in a new context, making up a new tempo with elements
written years ago. I read mostly his travel notes and
letters, both his own and his wife’s. The warmth when
writing about his family and the notebooks where he
studied his children gives you a lot to think about – the
father role and how little things have changed in the
construction of family”.
“I was inspired by the notion of “origin”, and this became
a starting point for the initial recordings”, recalls
Planningtorock. “I had recently recorded with the Icelandic
percussionist Hjörleifur Örn Jónsson for my new album,
and I suggested we should travel to Iceland and challenge
Hjörleifur to try and create strange, unique animal sounds
using unconventional methods of playing his percussion
instruments. Olof and I also recorded for example the
inside of pianos and various other instruments. The end
result was an amazing archive of sounds, which contained
strong, physical presences and became the basis of the
piece”.
As Olof Dreijer puts it: “We resampled what we recorded
and tried to create the sound of a classical orchestra going
crazy”.

Another archive was created in November 2008 when Olof

Dreijer travelled to Northern Brazil, to the Amazonas. As
part of sound artist Francisco López’ workshop, he went
into the jungle with a hard disc recorder and a microphone
to absorb nature at its most ecstatic.
“Just listening and being out in the nature really affects
your approach to music. One very striking thing is your
approach to time. The development of sound over time,
and these long periods of listening really give you another
approach to composition. And there are sounds that you
at first think are random, like the rhythms of a frog chorus
for example. But then you start to hear these very strict
patterns and rhythms. It’s really fascinating”, he recalls
about the work on capturing the different animals at their
finest hour, which could be basically any hour. Meaning
that the workshop often ventured out, with only the moon
and heavy flashlights to carve visible paths through the
rainforest. “You can only see just where you put your feet,
and for every step you take, you have to be careful not to
step on a crocodile or a snake”.
Selection and biodiversity are detonating all around us in
infinitely slow patterns that never cease to develop, and
the sprawling symphonies of Amazonas fed Olof Dreijer
important raw material for Tomorrow, in a Year that ended
up consisting of both field recordings and
artificially/electronically made nature sounds. Which plays
with the idea of authenticity and origin: Sounds from
different material such as stones, rain, wind, animals
mixed with Dreijer’s suggested, envisioned sounds of early
amoebas, lava, tectonics, even birds of his mind.
Imagination is also creation.
Darwin’s constant questioning, his aspirations and insights
from his journeys and his writings have permeated the
creative bones of The Knife and their collaborators.
Infecting the circuits of their machinery, inspiring new
methods of working, writing and controlling as well as
letting go of the control in the creative process, letting
evolutionary patterns take over.
The evolution of The Knife’s music is apparent from the
first signs of life on this double album, and it soon reveals
a more dramatic, epic, brutal quality. The quartet of
Planningtorock, Mt.Sims and the Dreijer-siblings not only
replicate and breed new species, but also re-build the
sprawling pre-historic landscapes of evolution. There’s a
sophisticated interpretation of primitivism at play, which
reminds me of Igor Stravinskijs brilliant crushing of
romantic tradition with Le Sacre du Printemps from 1913.
But there’s also an explosion of inspiration that results in
complex relationships and convulsions of contrast.
Avantgarde of 40’s and 50’s embracing glitch and noise
music of the 90’s and 00’s. The shimmering humane
timbres of a mezzo soprano trying to float above the
unforgiving rusty machinery in the labours of evolution.
Composition clashing into chance. The 70 beats per
minute of the heart of Darwin, the 120+ bpm in the
techno-signature of “Seeds”.

It has in many ways been conceptual. You’ll find

instrumentation, phrasing and rhythm based on the
rhythm of different insects and animals, for example the
chorus of poison dart frogs. And Olof Dreijer tried to
trigger evolutions in his equipment, for example through
the examination of the development of bird song. “How it
starts with a simple beep, how note is being added to
note, copied from the mother. So I did a feedback noise
inspired by this”, Dreijer recalls. “I made a small short
sound with the first electronic box and let it duplicate and
self copy into other boxes, having slight changes in each
box and in the end having it come out with a completely
new character. Or having one sound duplicate into a
branch of sounds”.
Olof Dreijer’s chain of electronic chambers of change
relates to the way a gene is changing its character by
“self-copying” as explained by the British biologist Richard
Dawkins and his gene trees in the book, The Blind
Watchmaker. Starting with a simple amoeba as the main
trunk, which is then being duplicated, with different copies
changing in different directions thus creating an ever
more complex tree of mutating branches.
“Dawkins’ gene trees have been a big inspiration in the
way a sound modulates and grows into a new sound.
Everything is changing, varying all the time”, says Olof
Dreijer. “We tried to capture the extremely slow evolution
in the way we composed. Elements in the music should
happen slowly over time, and also sounds come early in a
piece and later come back to show how some things don’t
change. Like the turtle”.
“But the aim has also been to strike a balance between
the conceptual and the emotional. We had to find out
what we could tell that wasn't already told by scientists.
We can only give a feeling of what evolution is”, says Olof
Dreijer. “The dialogue with the chemistry of the human
psyche: What makes you get moved by a certain melody
or lyric? Is it just because you’re just used to it? Is it a
form of nostalgia or is it something physical?”
This tension is also found in the contrast of Darwin’s work
on the many species and his notes about his beloved
representatives of his own species. The cold analysis in
the former, the warm love in the latter. And it is also to be
found in The Knife’s earlier work, especially their latest
album, Silent Shout from 2006. The analytical approach to
the process of creating artificial life – transfiguring their
own vocals and nurturing new synthetic sounds in the
bowels of the equipment. But at the same time the
communication of emotional impact, critical engagement,
vulnerable participation in life as we know it and suffer
from it.
This tension also breathes in the lyrics The Knife and their
collaborators wrote for Tomorrow, in a Year, where
Darwin’s analytical discoveries of evolution’s mercy and
brutality are being intertwined with his joy of seeing early
expressions and gestures of his children, but also the
lament of his ten year-old daughter Annie’s death.
Matt Sims – who wrote the libretto for the opera in
collaboration with Karin Dreijer Andersson – notes that it
seems impossible to use Darwin’s scientific methods
without applying meaning, value, even a feeling of
compassion or identification.
“The empirical way in which Darwin wrote inspired a kind
of cold empirical libretto. However the words can be
applied to more sympathetic situations”, explains Matt
Sims and points to how human interpretations and morals
can still yield new meaning from the British scientist 150
years later. For example in Darwin’s notation on the
geographical distribution of species through Atlantic
currents moving 1400 miles in 42 days, which inspired the
text for the song “Seeds”. “Upon reading his notes that
dealt with the methodology, he used, I could not help also
to relate his notion of the distribution of species with that
of the globalization in modernity – ethnical, economical
and political”, Matt Sims explains.
Olof Dreijer expands on this inclination to a morally
responsible and culturally aware reading of On The Origin
of The Species: ”When I read Darwin I get a positive
feeling of humans being just one out of many species. In a
very non hierarchical way. But, having more developed
brains, it’s also the human species’ responsibility to do
something better, to show that we can be more equal. I
see humans as mainly cultural beings, because I think it’s
dangerous to start applying what you think could be
“natural” behaviour to humans”, Olof Dreijer says.

There’s a Darwin quote that has been resonating through

the process of creating the music of Tomorrow, in a Year:
“How to say something that had never been said before,
in a way that made it sound like something everybody had
always known”.
It’s all in our genes. The fellowship. And we know. But the
knowledge might disappear in software updates and
household budgets. So, here’s 90 minutes of recollecting
that we are all just adaptors in the grander liquid design of
evolution.
In accordance with this humbling thought The Knife has
fittingly decided to open for further evolution by releasing
Tomorrow, in a Year under a Creative Commons-license,
that modifies the copyright of the release. Meaning that
the music can be legally replicated, remixed, mutated,
reinterpreted by anyone as long as it’s on a non-
commercial basis.
“We see the music we’ve done as musical exercises on all
the stuff that we’ve read, and we think that this research,
if you like, should be spread. Also I want to encourage a
creative way of listening where one can adapt and change
the music and make new versions”, Olof Dreijer says and
thus distances himself and his collaborators from a
romantic idea of the artist as the owner and conveyor of
unique, if not divine inspiration. An idea that refuse to die
even in the new collaborative climate of the online world.
Creation and imagination isn’t owned by one person, deity
or corporation, but shared and experienced by all. Darwin
himself modified his masterpiece several times. He
remixed and expanded on On Origin of The Species
through six editions, the sixth one published 13 years
after the original, being the first to contain the word
evolution. He would most likely appreciate the
evolutionary purposes of a more relaxed kind of
ownership, if he was alive today.

So, let go. Relax. We’re in this together. All part of the
slow explosion of selection, here transmitted in an
artistically highly evolved form. Closed headphones and
open mind are strongly recommended.

Ralf Christensen – December 2009, Copenhagen,

Denmark.