ANOTHER LENGTHY INTERVIEW, THIS TIME WITH ADDED VIDEO (!)
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For those uninitiated to Efterklang, they are a Danish five piece that look a lot like them over there. They’re not really a five piece though, given the wealth of collaborating artists and musicians involved in their creative process. In fact, they’re not really your average band. There’s no need for three chord tricks or minor key middle 8’s here. Theirs is an approach, yes, an aesthetic, that invites you into a multi sensory world far removed from our own, comprised of shapes and misshapes, logic and illogic, possibles and impossibles. Efterklang revel in combining the audio and the visual, creating an end product, an experience if you will, that’s immersive and inclusive. And all the time whilst sounding like Heaven’s own marching band. Their new LP, Parades, is a particular case in point. There are a million ways of describing it in light of what it is not (Razorlight, for example), but Wikipedia labels it/them with the rather nifty tag, “Neo-Classical.” This isn’t massively wrong. The record is expansive, majestic, complex and dense, beautiful in its robust layers of sound, with horns, strings and whatnot all fighting for space, and equally in it’s fragility. But enough of this. Over to Casper Clausen, the band’s primary vocalist, with whom I managed make chats before their Brighton Pressure Point show last week.
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How’s the tour been?
It’s been great. Our first proper UK Tour, it’s been so overwhelming, there have been so many big crowds, a lot of people. You’ve been working on Parades for a while now. How does a commitment like that work practically? Do you have your own recording space? Yeah, we’ve had our own studio since we did Tripper. Really, we’ve grown from a studio world. We spend more time in the studio than we spend playing live.
With regards to your new material, how have you gone about preparing your live show? With Parades, you have taken a more organic approach than Tripper. Has it been an easier record to take from the studio to the stage?
Well we built Parades up step by step, like a puzzle, but we’ve never got to play any of these songs live before. So when we prepare them, we have to restructure them. The record feels like a photograph, and we try and rebuild the music as something more simple, but with the same shapes. If we got lost in the process, we went back and looked at the photo. It was actually hard to tell when something was done, but it was actually pretty fun. This time we’ve been working with more composing musicians, more classically trained musicians. It’s been nice working with people that really have these great ideas that fit with the style of the record. Playing Tripper live…a lot of that came from the projections. It was a much more visual experience, so we had to deal with the films, and make music to suit them. We wanted to change that this time, to become a more physical experience.
You’re music is very non-linear and expansive, with no conventional verse-chorus structure. I’ve seen the phrase ‘post-pop’ applied to your work…
It was in a review, yeah. We’ve also been called post-rock! We don’t feel that really applies to us.
There’s a great attention to detail in your music, which seems more in line with classical composition that contemporary songwriting. How do you go about composing? Do you have any rules that you try and stick to?
Not really. We start out just going piece by piece. Something might start with us around a piano, and from there, we find something we like and build it up, getting people to come in, and work on the melodic structures. A lot of stuff we do is based not on one melody lines, but on a few. We do have lots of scoring, so we try and sort out how all these pieces fit together. We want to sound epic, but we don’t want it to be two dimensional…or flat and grey. It’s been a challenge, but a nice one.
It’s been a long time in the making.
One and a half years. It is a long time. It’s the longest we’ve worked on a project. It’s definitely a long time to spend with the same songs. It’s been annoying at some points, because it felt like these songs were talking back when we felt they we finished. We felt that…because we had this puzzle thing going on when we started, trying to build up songs from these small layers, then it could be hard to tell when a song was finished. But we found that sometimes when you had a bit of distance from a song, like standing outside the studio, having a cigarette, a coffee or whatever, and you were hearing it from three rooms away, it would then sound right. ———————————————————————————————————————
This idea of Parades working, in theory and in practice, as a puzzle, is certainly borne out by Efterklang’s live show. At one point, the band, in full choral harmonic flight, come to a halt, standing frozen in position for a good minute. Perhaps the longest silence in the history of live music to not induce a single heckle, they come back, of course, piece by piece, swiftly and easily building into something where there are so many interesting sounds and phrases competing for your attention that it’s almost overwhelming. Yes, it’s potentially austere and overt, but the band, to their credit, temper this by injecting the show with character and humour. Decked out in sparkly shoes, short trousers and shirts, looking not unlike what Liberace may have dreamed up after a night on the meths, the band stamp and convulse unselfconsciously all over the tiny stage, violin bows at a face threatening height. Clausen himself engages constantly with the crowd, chatting and grinning in between bouts of thrashing his drum set up at the front of the stage.
This extra percussion certainly adds to the new material. Mirador in particular sounds like the previously mentioned marching band, its sprinkled pianos and weaving strings gaining poise and pulse in a live setting. It’s in these grander moments when Efterklang possess similarly euphoric qualities to the likes of Wolf Parade or Arcade Fire, bold and dramatic yet warm and inviting. Elsewhere, they display a great intuitiveness, the music slowing down and regressing to their composite parts in an effortless fashion. It’s a testament to the attention to detail in these compositions that the dynamic shifts sound as natural as they do. What with the chimes, rings and melodies, it’s also weirdly festive.
In light of this, material from Tripper perhaps suffers by comparison, not from a lack of quality, but because the more claustrophobic arrangements don’t move you as instantly as the newer songs. The pockets of sound and the nuances of the filtered beats of that record are harder to detect in performance, less dynamic than something like Cutting Ice To Snow. Still beautiful, but in a different, more introverted way.
Efterklang – Step Aside
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You’ve mentioned the idea of it the record being approached conceptually as a puzzle. I’ve seen a video of the artwork being disassembled and reconstructed like a puzzle. This was an approach you decided on beforehand? How closely did you work with the people doing the artwork?
This was the first time we’ve been involved with the artists while doing the music. It was a rush, because they had this other project going on that they had to finish, but we just had to deal with it. We explained how we looked at the music, and how we felt it was structured. What we wanted was to create this otherworldly, very distinct world, something that you couldn’t find anywhere else. I think they did a brilliant job. It was nice to see the finished image. It makes sense to us.
Your music is very cinematic, and lends itself well to visual accompaniment. The Mirador video for example…
That was done by a guy called UFEX. We’re so used to working with other art forms that I don’t think we could make music without doing it (the videos). You’re trying to build it bigger than you are.
Would you ever consider doing something like the Mirador video, but on a larger scale? Like a full audio-visual release as opposed to a CD?
We’ve been dreaming about it! We’ve wanted to do something like this for years, but things cost money, and take time. That would be nice, extremely nice. But when you’ve worked on a record for a year and a half, it’s nice to let it stand on its own somehow. It feels like if we wanted to do a full audio-visual experience, we’d have had to have started it as an audio visual experience. I feel that we would have to collaborate with the other artists, so that it became a 50:50 thing. If we just made a piece of music and then put some visuals to it, your collaborators would be directed by you, whereas it would be preferable to do something together, entirely collaboratively.
It’s quite an undertaking.
It is, and you have to have the right idea. Collaboration is something that’s clearly very important to Efterklang, and the way you work. Is there anyone i particular that, ideally, you’d like to work with? Oh lot’s of people. We meet new people everyday. Yesterday we were in a room with Akron/Family, and they’re so sweet. Being in a band, you’re meeting people all the time, and sometimes it’s quite stressful, because you’re thinking about all these possibilities available to you. It’s the amazing thing about being a musician, to meet and work with other people. Music really is a universal language. You can achieve so much. With all these possibilities, like the internet, collaborate with a guy sitting in America. We’ve built the band up like this, recruiting people as we’ve gone along.
In terms of your influences, I read about this man called Moondog (pseudonym of blind American musician Louis Thomas Hardin, composer, inventor, helmet wearer) who you cited as an influence. What is it about him that appealed to you?
He’s just fucking cool. We were amazed by his music.
Have you ever invented any instruments?
Not so much. We just try and use things we find for the purposes of making music, like a spring, or old tubes. We’re more into using things we find, using raw sounds, to create music, if you could call it that! It’s extremely interesting though.
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That’s it then. As they bring their show to a close, Efterklang exit through the crowd, looking, in their sparkly threads, like a group of prize fighters. It’s all part of the production and the performance of the ‘world’ of the record that makes the band and their music such an involving experience. Go on, invest some time in it, if only to hear what all the fuss about this ‘Neo Classical’ music is. It’s the new grime, I swear.
Parades is out now on The Leaf Label.
(above photo is courtesy of www.myspace.com/efterklang)
