Opiate

Born Thomas Knak on 7 February 1973 in Glostrup, Copenhagen, Denmark, Opiate fashions exquisite soundscapes that set darting micro-beats against understated minor melodies. His first album, Objects For An Ideal Home, arrived in 1999 and followed Brian Eno’s early notion of ambient as ‘environmental music’, resulting in a collection expressly shaped for domestic playback—though the artist clarifies that ‘home’ isn’t necessarily ‘your three bedroom flat’ but can be ‘your body, your brain, your mental space or anywhere you choose to feel at home’. Eschewing keyboards and drum machines, Knak sources eighty percent of his material ‘from daily life objects - such as scissors - through a microphone’, feeding these ‘samples from other sources’ into a Macintosh for processing. Despite the meticulous production and sharp focus on sonic detail, he characterises his work as ‘spatial music’, deliberately stripping away dense layering, prominent melodic lines and heavy effects so the listener encounters open room within each piece. The Copenhagen artist achieves this goal with elegance and poise, producing tracks that combine captivating warmth with an uncommon lucidity. ‘This is music,’ observed BBCi’s Olli Siebelt, ‘that reminds me of nursery rhymes played at half their speed.’ A gentle innocence runs through Knak’s catalogue: the piece ‘Quick Save On A Sunday’ lets a vocal fragment cut across his crisp, clicking rhythms with the cheerfully un-rock ‘n’ roll cry ‘Toothpaste!’, while other spoken fragments repeat the isolated words ‘People’ and ‘Welcome’ or capture the babble of infants. Knak’s most visible partnership to date came with Björk, for whom he supplied the micro-beat foundations of ‘Undo’ and ‘Cocoon’ on the album Vespertine. An earlier sketch of the latter track appears on the compilation While You Were Sleeping, which gathers scarce and previously hard-to-find material. Alongside scoring music for television, radio and corporate clients, he operates the Hobby Industries label, issues recordings under his own name and as Gloria Hirsch, and belongs to the groups James Bong, Future 3 and System. His catalogue has appeared on City Centre Offices, Morr Music, Vertical Form, Raster Noton and April, and he has reworked tracks by artists including Björk, Bomb The Bass, Piano Magic, Tied And Tickled Trio, Lali Puna and Carsten Nicolai. (NB: Not to be confused with the Carlisle, England-based heavy metal band of the same name.)