The science of creating visuals for music.

Dazed Digital- Fever Ray interview

Published 1 month ago

Karin Dreijer Andersson gives us some insight into her inspirations along with a selection of her current favourite tunes

• Text by Flora Yin-Wong

Often hidden by bizarre costumes and mysterious masks, Swedish duo The Knife made a reputation for themselves for breaking the boundaries between music and various art forms. After writing the score for the opera production, 'Tomorrow, In a Year', based on the works of Charles Darwin, the Dreijer siblings have since embarked on solo projects via Olof's Oni Ayhun and Karin's Fever Ray.
Dreijer Andersson's haunting vocals have featured in collaborations with Royksopp, to her eerie singles like 'Seven', and 'Triangle Walks' attracting remixers from all over such as Tiga and CSS, to Martyn and Crookers. After the release of Fever Ray's eponymous debut album, she has since performed spellbinding live covers of songs by legends like Nick Cave, Vashti Bunyan and Peter Gabriel whilst touring, and is now set to release a cover of the latter's 'Mercy Street'.

Dreijer Andersson’s chilling signature vocals transform the piece: "It's an interpretation. We made it more intense and faster to fit our eccentric percussionists and energetic live musicians. It is a monotone track but we worked with the dynamics trying to make it sparkle". Before Fever Ray embarks on a stunning audio-visual show in Europe, with long term collaborator Andreas Nilsson as art director this September, she works up an exclusive mixtape for Dazed Digital.

Dazed Digital: Do you feel that 'Fever Ray' is your main concern/focus now? Will The Knife return?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I don't know, I'm happy having to do both, but it's good if it's something we don't have to agree upon together... I think it's good to have something solo going on...

DD: The working process is easier alone?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I think it's very different, it's easier when you don't have to agree with somebody else about what you're going to do but then you have to make all the decisions yourself and I think that can be really difficult. I don't know what's easier. I have to write everything myself in the end - but it's good to have other ears listening to what you're doing.

DD: Which way do you feel your music is going? Like Olof's Oni Ayhun project is taking the turn or more electronic music but has Fever Ray liberated you from all that - think I may have read you were getting bored of all the techno stuff?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I don't know... maybe... I think that differs a lot but it's been fun playing live, with quite a lot of organic things and working with Olaf on the opera album we were using only analogue equipment, so I don't know -  at the moment, I think of my future work as more minimal, a minimal Fever Ray.

DD: So how did 'Tomorrow, In A Year', the project inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species, come about? Does Darwin's work particularly relate or bear significance for you?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: We were commissioned by the theatre group to write it, so it was their idea from the beginning about Darwin, and at first all we knew about him were the things we had read in school. I think it was nice to do something else, like reading. We did that for a year really, just reading the Origin of Species and other works about Darwin, so it was really nice for a change. Also applying someone's theories on music, working with text in that way was really inspiring. It's something we've talked about continuing to do.

DD: How important do you think theatrics or the stage show is compared to the recorded music? How does it translate on stage and how do you devise the shows?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I think the live thing is more of an experiment of how to experience music. Where I am trying different endings and ideas that could happen, it's more like a playground for music, trying out ideas and seeing what happens if we dress up like this, then seeing what happens to the music. The writing and the studio work is the hard part.

DD: Do you think that the hiding part of your identity helps people to focus on the music or does it inadvertently divert people to a different talking point about 'image' anyway?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: That's always the tricky part I think, because when you try out all these costumes and masks, I think you gain so much more when doing it, when taking away the focus from some private person. It's playing with the character, a performer, like deconstructing the idea of a popstar or how a singer appears or should be on stage.

DD: Do you think where you've grown up has influenced your music? Like the darker moods in your music?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I don't know... I think I have always liked melancholic music more than any other, but not necessarily Swedish music... we listened to a lot of African pop music when I was a kid at home, and also Eastern European music which can be really melancholic, so I don't know really about that or how the climate affects your music. Sometimes I think that if it's light or not where you are recording that affects music, but I'm not sure...

DD: As the themes in your music are quite supernatural, do you feel you relate to a sort of 'spirituality'?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: No, I don't think it's like supernatural, I think music and the ability to reach people and that you can like experience your emotions - that's the power of music. You don't have to talk about anything spiritual, humanity and nature itself has such power you don't have to explain with any religious aspects of it, I'm an atheist!

DD: You've just done a Peter Gabriel cover, do you mostly listen to older music like this?
Karin Dreijer Andersson: I'm a very old woman you know! I grew up with that track when I was a kid, it meant a lot to me then, I thought it was really beautiful. I think I was really moved how it created that kind of atmosphere, and I just wanted to try it and play it now with a live set up and percussionist and see how it works, how it sounded.

TRACKLIST

1. Khulumani - Nkata Mawewe
2. The Tale - Meredith Monk
3. Guiyome - Konono No. 1
4. Jungle Riot - Ove-Naxx
5. Ngunyuta Dance - BBC
6. Natsu Ga Kita - Afrirampo
7. Do You Be? - Meredith Monk
8. Believer - M.I.A.
9. Kuar - Olof Dreijer remix - Emmanuel Jal
10. Dread - Nate Young

Mercy Street is out now on covetable limited edition 7" and on download through Rabid Records. The 7” single will include album track ‘Dry and Dusty’. Fever Ray is playing Brixton Academy tomorrow, Wednesday 8th of September.

Photographs by Jörgen Ringstrand
Costumes by Andreas Nilsson


I have highlighted in red the important information that will help me further my project.

The end of Fever Ray... for now

Hi,

I want to thank everybody who has come to our performances during the last 18 months. It has been a fantastic adventure for me and an interesting time experimenting with the show illusion. I also want to thank the people who have made it possible, my band and my crew who have been extremely thorough, hard working, amazingly committed and most important; fun to hang out with. Also my management for bringing us out to see the world. I try not to mention any names but I have to say Andreas Nilsson, thank you for sharing your ideas, patience, humour and your enthusiasm. I could never imagine all this could happen when I started this project a few years ago.

Now it may sound like I’m dying or quitting but I’m not. I just don’t want to tour anymore at the moment. I have built a new studio and have work to do. Olof and I have started playing together again and I will also write music for a theatre play, “The Hour Of The Wolf” by Ingmar Bergman, which will premiere next year at Dramaten (The Royal Dramatic Theatre) in Stockholm. And spend some time in the hammock too.

So long for now!

Karin

a big thankyou from Karin to all her fans and co-workers for their support over the last tour.

this is the end of Fever Ray for a while... could Karin send out something to thank her fans and allow them to hold on to the memories and re-experience fever ray while she's gone?

i think it is really important for bands and companies to do this for their fans as it shows them how thankful they are and makes them feel like they are contributing and helping them. 

especially if they receive something of a good quality that they would hold onto for years to come, like a souvenir, something special and unique that only a small majority of people will have.

How can the music industry engage with fans?

ARTICLE FROM WIRED.CO.UK

By Duncan Geere |05 February 2010 |Categories: Culture, Technology

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The music industry seems to be in trouble. The major labels have been in free-fall for a decade. Consumers are increasingly spending their time and money on videogames. The charts are a never-ending list of X-Factor finalists. Despite a stream of young acts bubbling under the surface, fewer bands seem to be 'making it' than ever.

Many pin the blame on the web -- where a slow start from the industry has put the power into the hands of technology companies and filesharers. But the music industry has begun to fight back. A growing trend is seeing music becoming more interactive, using games, websites and mobile apps to allow people to play with music, rather than just listening to it.

The idea behind all of this interactivity is to increase what marketers call "engagement". With the vast quantities of entertainment content being pushed at people every waking hour of the day, how do you make something stick? By allowing the listener space to explore the music themselves by giving them simple remix tools, or playing a game that interacts with the music.

The positive effect of this approach has already been seen. Aging rock acts have seen an entirely new generation of fans appearing at their concerts and buying their music simply because it's included in games like Rock BandGuitar Hero. The sales of Aerosmith's "Same Old Song and Dance" jumped 500 percent the week after it was released as downloadable content for Guitar Hero. and

Even lesser-known acts can benefit from this effect. Powermetallers Dragonforce also saw sales of their song "Through the Fire and Flames" - thought to be one of the hardest tracks in the game - jump 500 percent after Guitar Hero III's release. At Christmas 2007, when many had just been bought iTunes gift cards and a copy of Guitar Hero, the sales jump reached nearly 2000 percent above pre-release figures.

Another attempt at benefiting from a gaming/music tie-in is being pioneered by a company called Reality Jockey with an iPhone application called RjDj. The app can change and adapt songs based on input from the handset's various sensors - if the phone is moving about a lot, the music could become more intense. If you're walking, the beat can match your pace. It can even take a microphone input to inject ambient noise into the songs.

This means that you never hear the song twice in the same way. Depending on how obvious or subtle the changes are in a particular piece, the song can be relatively unchanged by this external input, or it could be dramatically different. Little Boots has her own RjDj application that offers "secret" sections of her single Remedy if you listen to the track in the right environments. A perfect recipe to get fans to listen incredibly intently to the track.

Another app, Retro racing game Lilt Line, challenges you to avoid walls while tapping the screen of your phone in time with a dubstep beat provided by 16bit. It's an album of sorts -- there are 14 songs in 14 levels --  but unlike a traditional album, you can't listen to the later songs until you've passed the first ones.

But some don't like this technique, seeing it as a marketing gimmick polluting the simple, pure expression of musical talent and emotion. Other companies are trying to tap into this opposing sentiment, delivering stripped down experiences that present just the music and do it with the minimum of fuss.

The most famous of these accolytes of simplicity is Swedish music streaming service Spotify, which puts you mere seconds away from any of the 7 million tracks in its library -- then promptly gets out of the way and just lets you listen to it. You can create playlists, share tracks with friends, and listen on your phone, but the music listening experience always takes centre stage (if you pay not to have ads).

Another service, Soundcloud, offers a very simple way for musicians to share their tracks with both collaborators and the public. Upload a sound file, and you can then embed it onto a blog or website. It is interactive -- it invites listeners to comment on particular moments of the track -- but that interactivity never gets in the way of the act of listening, it merely augments it.

Andy Malt, editor of industry newsletter CMU Daily, told Wired UK: "Most people don't want to have to jump through hoops to listen to music that they've just paid for. I engage with music by listening to it and I don't feel that relationship needs to be "enhanced" in any way."

"However, I can see why putting one of your songs in a game is a smart move, even if you make it downloadable for free. In fact, more so if it's free. You've got a captive audience who might listen to that song over and over again, sometimes in one sitting".

There may be a way of artfully and gracefully making music more interactive. RjDj's experiments with enviromental modification are an interesting start. But we're yet to see a truly great piece of musical art that comes in the form of an iPhone game.

In fact, right now, most of the offerings from the major labels contain constant offers of lyrics, biographies, tour dates and merchandise that barely conceal a frantic, desperate attempt to upsell in any way possible. It degrades the music that it accompanies. It cheapens the experience.

And the other problem is that many of these approaches limit how and when you can listen. You can't transfer any of the music that you've bought in Guitar Hero or Rock Band to your MP3 player. You can't burn the music out of Lilt Line onto a mix CD to play in your car. It's stuck -- which devalues it further.

So while there may be a lot of potential and value in what games, mobile applications and the web can bring to music, let's have a little bit of restraint. Interactivity should augment music, not swamp it in a mess of marketing. Ultimately, the songs should speak for themselves.

Pink Floyd -The Wall Tour

using visuals, creating an experience to engage with music, makes people remember it !

Richie Hawtin -Live Visuals Iphone App

I also saw Richie Hawtin's live show at Bestival which was truely immense, here's a view videos below. Interactive phone app where you have control of the live music, have an input into it. Also high tech visuals used to parallel the music.



Richie Hawtin (Plastikman) also had created an app for the iphone where you were able to interact with the visuals and sounds within the live show!

Smirnoff ice- Nightlife exchange project

this new project by smirnoff connects with my idea of being involved in /creating and experience. 
i like how people have the chance to input their ideas, in turn it creates a night that people will love and will be fully engaged with

'what i found so challenging about this subject is it is so difficult to explain through words, no one will understand unless they too have been there and experienced it for themselves'

quoting myself from my presentation this statement keeps cropping up all the way through my project and is directing my line of thought... what can i do/ Fever Ray do, that will allow us to share the experience we had?

could i send something out to the fans to create their own experiences or re-live the experience she had created.

how can i get people at home to engage with music on other levels, not just listening to the cd but creating an experience like ones at live shows.

Colours used in the performance

The colours used in the performance are mainly blue green and purple, with soft glows of yellow/ orange from the haunting lampshades.

Green: Affects the nervous system, and is hypnotic and sedative. Lowers blood pressure. It is useful in cases of exhaustion, neuralgia, nervous irritability, anxieties, neurotic fears, and headaches. Has an overall calming affect (This is why green is used in operating theatres and on hospital gowns for its calming effect). Comforting.

Violet: Has the most subduing influence followed by purple.

Blue: Light blue: Youthful, cool, masculine
Dark blue: Calming, trustworthy, stable, mature

  Green

Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money.
Green has great healing power. It is the most restful color for the human eye; it can improve vision. Green suggests stability and endurance. Sometimes green denotes lack of experience; for example, a 'greenhorn' is a novice. In heraldry, green indicates growth and hope. Green, as opposed to red, means safety; it is the color of free passage in road traffic.
Use green to indicate safety when advertising drugs and medical products. Green is directly related to nature, so you can use it to promote 'green' products. Dull, darker green is commonly associated with money, the financial world, banking, and Wall Street.

Dark green is associated with ambition, greed, and jealousy.
Yellow-green can indicate sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy.
Aqua is associated with emotional healing and protection.
Olive green is the traditional color of peace.

  Blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.
You can use blue to promote products and services related to cleanliness (water purification filters, cleaning liquids, vodka), air and sky (airlines, airports, air conditioners), water and sea (sea voyages, mineral water). As opposed to emotionally warm colors like red, orange, and yellow; blue is linked to consciousness and intellect. Use blue to suggest precision when promoting high-tech products.
Blue is a masculine color; according to studies, it is highly accepted among males. Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability; it is a preferred color for corporate America.
Avoid using blue when promoting food and cooking, because blue suppresses appetite. When used together with warm colors like yellow or red, blue can create high-impact, vibrant designs; for example, blue-yellow-red is a perfect color scheme for a superhero.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.
Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

  Purple

Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition. It conveys wealth and extravagance. Purple is associated with wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, mystery, and magic.
According to surveys, almost 75 percent of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors. Purple is a very rare color in nature; some people consider it to be artificial.
Light purple is a good choice for a feminine design. You can use bright purple when promoting children's products.
Light purple evokes romantic and nostalgic feelings.
Dark purple evokes gloom and sad feelings. It can cause frustration.

Colours and emotions

Many languages contain expressions that use colour metaphorically (common examples in English include "green with envy," "feeling blue," "seeing red," "purple passion," "white lies," and "black rage.") this can make it difficult then to translate these ideas in to other languages in different cultures.

Although the medical benefits are still in question, colour has been shown to cause definite physical and emotional reactions in humans and in some animals.

People who view a display of unusual colours produced by special illumination may experience headaches and nervous disorders; tasty wholesome food served under such conditions appears repulsive and may even induce illness.

Scientific evaluations have linked the sensations of relaxation or pleasure, tension or irritation, spirituality or passion to the influences of colour. A number of studies over the years have looked at the relationship between colour and emotions. This can have a number of practical applications. Children who are taught in a predominantly red classroom will become irritable. The impact of strong reds could be one reason why so many fast food chains are coloured red, yellow or orange. Studies suggest this stimulates the customers making them hungry yet impatient at the same time (New Idea, 20/06/92 p. 43 Colour Your World).

Understanding the psychological effect that light has on us is important in relating to light and colour. When light strikes our eyes, it stimulates a chain of events throughout the body. These reactions might be, a quickening of the nervous system, excitation or depressing, and effect of tranquillity etc. Feelings of irritation or pleasure may occur.

Some basics in colour theory involve the idea of "colour temperature", temperature being defined as colours that would be considered cool, warm or even hot.

Colours in the muted blue, green and violet range are considered as "jewel tone colours". They are "Cool colours" and are, restful, and tranquil for the eye. Warm colours would be defined as muted range of red, brown and orange. These colours are used to keep the mind stimulated and alert. Hot colours are yellow, pink, bright orange, and pure red. The uses of these colours are for the purpose of exciting the eye. The soft colours are blue, green, and violet. Soft colours are also known as cool colours, because of the cooling effect they have psychologically. They also have a quieting and relaxing effect, although they can be cold in some way if not lifted by something else.  

-science states that the colours used in the performance should result in feelings of tranquility and restful.  the colours and use of lighting has major effects on the mood created and the emotion of the audience.

Remembering emotions

Many researchers use self report measures of felt emotion as a manipulation check. This raises an interesting question and a possible methodological weakness: are people always accurate when they recall how they felt in the past? Several findings suggest this is not the case. For instance, in a study of memory for emotions in supporters of former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot, supporters were asked to describe their initial emotional reactions after Perot’s unexpected withdrawal in July 1992 and again after the presidential election that November.

Between the two assessment periods, the views of many supporters changed dramatically as Perot re-entered the race in October and received nearly a fifth of the popular vote. The results showed that supporters recalled their past emotions as having been more consistent with their current appraisals of Perot than they actually were.

Another study found that people’s memories for how distressed they felt when they learned of 9/11 terrorist attacks changed over time and more so, were predicted by their current appraisals of the impact of the attacks (Levine et al., 2004). It appears that memories of past emotional responses are not always accurate, and can even be partially reconstructed based on their current appraisal of events. 

-this shows that people's memory of emotions change over time and it would be a more precise account of emotions and experiences if i was to play the live show to them with the questionnaire this way they are recording the emotion they are feeling at the time

A shared experience

Subjective vs. objective emotions

The view of the self as independent in individualistic cultures leads to the perception of emotions as a unique personal experience.
The emotional reality is therefore taken as subjective: different people are expected to have different emotional worlds, and to react in different ways to the same experiences.
On the contrary, in collectivistic cultures, emotions are experienced out of relationships.
They reflect the outer, rather than the inner world and are therefore taken as objective: it is assumed that all people experience the same emotion in a given social situation.

-this shows that the audience at the performance experienced the same emotion even though they may name it differently it is the same emotion they experienced

What are emotions?

Emotion is the complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience".
Emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality and disposition, and motivation.
A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviors and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing. If one can have the emotion without the corresponding behavior, then we may consider the behavior not to be essential to the emotion. Neuroscientific research suggests there is a "magic quarter second" during which it's possible to catch a thought before it becomes an emotional reaction. In that instant, one can catch a feeling before allowing it to take hold.
The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.

There are basic and complex categories, where some basic emotions can be modified in some way to form complex emotions. In one model, the complex emotions could arise from cultural conditioning or association combined with the basic emotions. Alternatively, analogous to the way primary colors combine, primary emotions could blend to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience. For example interpersonal anger and disgust could blend to form contempt.ensional "circumplex model" which describes the relations among emotions.
This model is similar to a color wheel. The vertical dimension represents intensity, and the circle represents degrees of similarity among the emotions. He posited eight primary emotion dimensions arranged as four pairs of opposites. Some have also argued for the existence of meta-emotions which are emotions about emotions.

Another important means of distinguishing emotions concerns their occurrence in time. Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (for example, surprise), whereas others can last years (for example, love). The latter could be regarded as a long term tendency to have an emotion regarding a certain object rather than an emotion proper (though this is disputed). A distinction is then made between emotion episodes and emotional dispositions. Dispositions are also comparable to character traits, where someone may be said to be generally disposed to experience certain emotions, though about different objects. For example an irritable person is generally disposed to feel irritation more easily or quickly than others do. Finally, some theorists place emotions within a more general category of 'affective states' where affective states can also include emotion-related phenomena such as pleasure and pain, motivational states (for example, hunger or curiosity), moods, dispositions and traits.
The neural correlates of hate have been investigated with an fMRI procedure. In this experiment, people had their brains scanned while viewing pictures of people they hated. The results showed increased activity in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in the premotor cortex, in the frontal pole, and bilaterally in the medial insula of the human brain. The researchers concluded that there is a distinct pattern of brain activity that occurs when people are experiencing hatred.

Sigur Ros -interactive

Sigur Ros have a lot fan-band interaction through their website and have amazing competitions where winners have the chance of winning personal, one of items such as the bands instruments. I think this is such a beautiful, personal touch for a band which is so huge, to give away signed instruments it is something a fan would treasure forever and holds a lot value on such a personal level.

Briefing

Upto this point i have been looking at live music, visual music and the peoples personal experiences to this, i have gathered information on how people react to these experiences. 
In todays crit we were split into small groups and explained our project so far, what we had researched and where we saw the project going, collecting feedback and idea generation from the others in the group helped me to indentify the key points of my project and where i see this project developing.

-I really like the idea of being able to generate a certain emotion so i would like to explore the science behind moods and emotions and how to control them.
- the news that the Fever Ray project is soon to end has really spurred me to think of something to send out to the fans to thank them so I will research into band merchandise
-i like the idea of somehow generating a mood through the merchandise, possibly interactive packs enabling the audience to connect with the music like at a live show... this idea then encorporates all my research so far!

Similar Live shows and response

I have looked at similar bands to Fever Ray such as Sigur Ros, The Knife, Jonsi, Roykskopp, Radiohead, to see what their live shows are like, what elements are involved and how they make people feel.



i saw jonsi also in the summer and the animations in the background were unbelievable and took you on a journey throughout his songs, the final song showed an animation of a storm along with the music you actually felt like you were in the eye of the storm.

Rabid Records