Q: I know you were working as a solo artist after having been in several bands over the years. Did you call yourself Knifeworld back then or did you only come up with the band name when you formed the band as it is today?
Kavus Torabi: I wasn’t really working as a solo artist. I’d recorded an album of songs and I suppose I felt a little wary of putting it out as ‘Kavus Torabi’, it had a few guests and friends on it anyway, so I called it Knifeworld. I was a full time member of Cardiacs while I was making it and the plan, originally, had been for Tim Smith (Cardiacs leader) to play bass in the live band . Nonetheless the awful circumstances that befell Tim put Cardiacs on hold indefinitely. Once the album came out in 2009, I put the band together to promote it without any real plans as to what would happen next but after a few gigs we realised we really had something and so the band was born.
Q: Has Knifeworld always had eight members or have you just gradually kept adding them as your vision has expanded?
KT: We started out as a six piece, with a different druQer and bassist. It was after we released the Clairvoyant Fortnight EP in 2012, on which Chloe had overdubbed multiple horns, that we thought it’d be fun to do some gigs where we could replicate that sound live. Charlie, our then new bass player, knew Josh and Nicki and brought them over to rehearsals. It was never the plan to be an eight piece. As you can imagine, for an underground band, it’s pretty impractical. Nonetheless, I’ve never been one to let practicality stand in the way of an insane idea, besides, once I heard the band with the the horn section it was like taking crack, there was no going back. Nicki, who played tenor sax on the last album, had to leave and was replaced by Olly who plays baritone sax, that changed the sound a great deal. It’s such an unusual horn section, Alto, Baritone and bassoon. It sounds really unique and it’s wonderful to be able to write for them. They’re a lot more up front on this record, it’s almost as if the horn section play the part of a guitar at some points. I sort of wrote myself out a little. There’s bits where the horns play the chords and riffs while the guitar sort of weaves a line through them.
Q: What does the name Knifeworld mean to you? Is there a story or meaning behind it?
KT: There’s not much of a story. My friend Jo Spratley came up with it at the tail end of an improbable conversation at about four in the morning. As soon as I heard those two words together, I knew it had to be the name of the thing I was working on. It had such a spooky resonance.
Q: What is the intended meaning of the new record being called Bottled Out of Eden?
KT: The title can be interpreted in a number of ways, it seemed to shiQer with a strange magic. I had the title before I’d written any of the songs. That’s always been the case, I have the title for the next album too. Once I’d come up with it then it gave me a general idea about the shape and vibe the album was going to have. It helps give a cohesiveness to the material because, even if fairly abstract and nebulous, you can identify what will and won’t work with the album as a whole. I wrote some songs that didn’t fit with the overall idea so I put them aside to use for something else. Nothing ever gets wasted.
Q: To my ears, Bottled Out of Eden sounds a bit more accessible than The Unravelling. Were you trying to write something that would iQediately grab the listener this time around? (It almost seems like there’s a pop vibe there.)
KT: Absolutely. We wanted this to be our pop album. After our last record, The Unravelling, which was pretty maudlin and introspective, I wanted to make something joyous and upbeat. The real events that surrounded the making of it tried to pull it in a more melancholy direction so it ended up being a bit of both. I think it’s our best album.
Q: Do you write all of Knifeworld’s songs alone or does the whole band get together and write or how does it work?
KT: I write all the songs, and generally the arrangements too although I gladly ceded control a little on this one and we worked on a lot of the arrangements together. I’m a fairly benevolent control freak but this line up of the band has been playing together for a while and we’re all used to each other’s idiosyncratic way of playing. Everyone gets what Knifeworld is about so it’s more a case of showing the other guys the tunes, suggesting a general arrangement and saying, “Well, you know what to do”. The buck stops with me, and I’ll certainly be very vocal about something that isn’t working but this album felt far more like a group effort.
Q: Do you usually write the lyrics or the music first or do they come to you at the same time or?
KT: Almost always music first. Usually as I’m writing the melodies, little phrases and lines will appear and sometimes I’ll keep them. That said, If I happen upon little phrases that I like, I’ll make a note of them to use later in lyrics if I can. I tend to talk far too much and, owing to the law of averages, while most of what I say is largely pointless and annoying, occasionally I might find myself on a particularly florid or colourful rant, and stop myself and say “Oh, that’s good…I’ll keep that” and make a note of it before continuing to talk at whoever happens to be in my vicinity.
Q: How old were you when you wrote your first song? Do you remember what it was called?
KT: A piano turned up in our house when I was seven and I wrote a very rudimentary tune on it called Highway Hotel but I’d been inventing tunes in my head for as long back as I can remember. I used to have theme tunes for all my toys, as if they had their own TV programs.
From: https://loveispop.com/interviews/an-exclusive-interview-with-kavus-torabi-of-knifeworld/
