Album Review: The Knife - Shaking The Habitual

Two weeks ago I was talking to a friend about music and its ability in the future to begin and end as a truly human product or experience. Will music mean the same to us once the guitar or piano has played its last original tune? This friend introduced me to an article called ‘Midnight at the Singularity Disco’, a really interesting piece outlining the evolution of music beyond human control or consumption. Amongst other things, the article talks about the Japanese pop group AKB48, whose newest member, Aimi Eguchi, is a robot, designed to resemble each of the group’s existing members’ best attributes. Perfection... right? Naturally, there’s a fear about such things. The enjoyment of music may be some kind of emotional reflex in the brain, but when music becomes a mere trigger for that - an infinite machine-composed stream of ultimately fulfilling and forever original rhythms and melodies - I think I’ll simply stop listening. A few days later I heard Shaking The Habitual, The Knife’s first ‘regular’ album since 2006’s Silent Shout. Such fears disappeared in a shot - robots can’t make music this good.

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