The moral of the story

A few weeks ago, I was doing my usual "One link leads to another" thing when I ran across this video of Swedish singer Fever Ray accepting some sort of award. Please take a look, if you can, before reading this rest of this post.



Okay, so, are you totally weirded out now? Are you fascinated? Are you wondering what kind of music this lady produces when her mouth isn't totally obstructed? Those were my initial thoughts. So I clicked on over to some of her music videos (Vimeo has better versions than YouTube; start here, if you're interested), just out of curiosity, and ended up liking her stuff so much that I downloaded her album.

Now, at this point, you're probably wondering where I'm going with all of this. After all, the awards "speech" does have veils and voicelessness, but it's not exactly sexy...well, okay, the veil is a little bit sexy, but that makeup? Nope, I'm out. So why am I blogging about this woman, then? Because Fever Ray is the solo effort of Karin Dreijer Andersson, half of the brother-sister electronica band The Knife. I'd never heard of either of them before I saw that awards video, but now I at least know what they sound like (They keep their appearances mostly hidden).

Which brings me to the point of this post. Aside from Karin's recognizable voice, Fever Ray doesn't sound much at all like The Knife. Is Olaf the one who brings most of the electronica edge to The Knife? Is Karin the one who brings most of the creepiness? Is the Fever Ray album typical of Karin's personal style? What would a solo album by Olaf sound like?

It's all about collaboration, you see. More and more, I think of the collaborative process as being like making a baby (Get your heads out of the gutter and work with me here). Each person involved has her or his own individual style, and when they combine their efforts, the result blends those styles and becomes something new and interesting in its own right. At least, that's the way it should work. If one person dominates too much, you don't have a collaboration at all; you have a clone. But if the process goes well, you end up with something none of the contributors by themselves could have produced. And that's incredibly cool.