You're an enigmatic Swedish electronica duo that has won pretty much every award possible at your country's version of the Grammy awards, the Grammis. You're reported to have recorded an album in the vaults of an old church, and you've single-handedly brought back the immeasurable creepiness of the plague doctor's hooded bird mask into the public consciousness. What do you next? Well, if you can safely check off all these boxes, then you are probably The Knife, and you are now working on developing a Darwinian opera entitled Tomorrow, in a Year for Danish theatre group Hotel Pro Forma.
If you are still reading this and you are not The Knife, got your mind around this? Good. Because details so far are sparse. Set to debut sometime in 2009, the opera pays tribute to the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species with rockin' tunes and experimental form.
Hotel Pro Forma's website promises vague tidbits about how the music is written for "three singers who come from different backgrounds: electronica pop, classical opera and performance. They are the protagonists of the performance, displaying three ways of experiencing the world. They are the spokesman, the organiser, and the one who acts. They are structure, sensation, form, time and thought." So, it's no surprise that the performance is said to "challenge the conventional conception of opera," but trust me -- opera glasses and full-length capes (but please, no unsettling bird masks) are always appropriate for this sort of thing.
