The knife.

THESE GUYS would totally make the Rickter Scale of Doom of Doom if they used Flying-V guitars, five-stringed basses, and double bass pedals. Instead, the enigmatic duo goes the route of bone-chilling synths and mesmerizing drum sequences to get their cryptic messages across. Too mysterious for personal appearances, Karin and her brother Olof check in via telephone, from Stockholm and Berlin respectively, to pass on what might be their last words as The Knife.

How did you get into making music?

Karin Dreijer Andersson: I don't think it has been that I've really chosen it, it just happened.

Olof Dreijer: I was interested in creating exciting sounds, and that was a bit hard with the saxophone, which I played before.

How did you start working together? Karin: In '99, I had made a demo of a few songs that I wanted to record more properly, and since he was making music on the computer, I just asked if he wanted to help.

And then it just worked?

Karin: I don't know if I know that yet, but we have continued until now at least.

How do your similarities or differences affect your music?

Karin: I think Olof is much more into every little detail. He can sit with a little specific sound for a week or so, and I think I am much more looking into the whole track. I think I have a bigger perspective than he has and maybe that's a good match.

Do you disagree on anything?

Karin: We don't disagree much, but we can discuss things forever, taking months to try different solutions for very small things. It takes us quite a long time to make an album.

Olof: We both know what The Knife should be about.

What is The Knife about?

Olof: The Knife changes a lot, but for the new album, we tried to do more ambient, melodic stuff that moves you. And there's always a theatrical aspect to it: we'll come up with these different characters that sing the lyrics. That's why we pitch the voices a lot.

Karin: We wanted to maximize the expression of the songs. It's good to go into a character and tell a story through a voice that suits the track. Ween uses pitch shifting a lot, and they go into very different kinds of genres and characters when making their music, so I guess we were inspired by them.

Have you had any encounters with any of the Black Metal bands in Scandinavia?

Olof: Not really, but I think they're very exciting because they explore occult stuff. Andreas Nilsson, who has done our videos and live show, is really into Norwegian Black Metal. Their aesthetic works well with our music. Are you guys into the occult at all? I see some dark themes going on.

Olof: I think it's quite normal compared to other music--normal in terms of darkness. We are into exploring dark sides of your psyche.

Karin: I think parts of our music are a bit dark. But I think it's getting more and more white actually. No, I don't think we're into any occult things. Yeah we have those big black beaks in our press photos, but I think we just try to dress like the music and our music is sometimes looking like black birds or something.

What do you mean, "getting more white"?

Karin: I think there's a lot of happiness and hope in our music, when I listen to it.

Is your music getting more serious?

Karin: Maybe, but I think we used a lot of humor and kitsch to present our tracks. For example, in the intro of "Marble House," we tried to make castanets, but it's still totally an electronic sound. We also made water sounds and other electro-acoustic things.

How come you refused to perform live for so long?

Olof: We've never seen any good reason to do it. We are a studio band and our music wouldn't be better performed live. But now we do this show because of Andreas' great visual concept. His first ideas and animations for the live show were so moving, we just had to do something with them.

Karin: We are part of a bigger thing now, like a theater. It's a lot of set design and dolls and robots on stage performing the songs and everything together with us.

Will you ever do a major tour? You only have three stops in the US.

Karin: l think Los Angeles will be our last show, maybe forever. Or for a very long time. Why is that?

Karin: Because we are finished, we are done. When we started this spring, in March, we said we were only going to do five shows and I think by the end of the year maybe we'll have done 25. So I think that's enough.

Do you think you're finished as a band?

Karin: I don't know. We haven't discussed what will happen after this album. I guess we will talk in December.

Where did Andreas get the idea to use those kids skateboarding in the "Heartbeats" video?

Olof: I don't how much it had to do with skateboarding, than it had to do with the idea of us as angels coming from above kind of thing. Also their movements worked really well together with the rhythm of the song.

Where did he get that footage?

Karin: We don't know. I think it must be a very old clip from the '60s or early '70s. I think he found it somewhere in the Internet. If somebody knows, it would be good.