F E S T I VA L F E AT U R E S | Efterklang H I G H F I V E
Danish indie rock band Efterklang make their live comeback at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. David Pollock speaks to them about their upcoming fifth album and their emphasis on togetherness
I t’s been seven years since Efterklang released their last proper album, 2012’s Piramida. And ahead of the release of fifth studio album Altid Sammen in September, they’ve picked Leith Theatre for their live comeback, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. It will also be their only UK date of the year, ahead of more in early 2020. For the typically devoted Efterklang fan – thrilled by a band whose intricate and emotive compositions place them somewhere between Radiohead, Sigur Rós and Max Richter – this show is a very big deal. ‘When they asked us to do it, it sounded cool,’ says the band’s vocalist Casper Clausen. When we speak it’s almost as warm in Scotland as it is in his home in Lisbon, where he says he’s ‘eating berries, drinking orange juice and then having a coffee.’ He still doesn’t know quite why he’s in the city; he and bandmate Mads Brauer lived in Berlin together, before Clausen moved for a time to Switzerland with a woman he was seeing (the core trio is completed by bassist Rasmus Stolberg).
‘I was curious about leaving Berlin and living in the south of Europe, mentality-wise,’
22 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–26 Aug 2019
he tells us. ‘I had a good friend in Lisbon who said, “come, it’s going to be great”, so I tried it and I’m still here. It’s undergoing a big change in many ways, but there are lots of good people in this city.’ What about Edinburgh? ‘We’ve been aware of the festival for many years, Rasmus’ cousin [the jazz musician and academic Haftor Medbøe] has been living there for many years, and when we were young Rasmus and I went on a teenage trip there in the midst of the festival, I remember it vividly. Plus, the show is just one month before the album is released, and we were looking for a way to start the band and get the machine working again for the rest of the year.’
Formed as a quartet in Copenhagen in 2001, Efterklang released their first album through the Leaf Label in 2004 but came to wider attention when third record Magic Chairs arrived in 2010, with the band now signed to 4AD. Next month’s release Altid Sammen, whose title translates as ‘Always Together’, is predominantly in Danish. The album began life towards the end of 2017 as a separate project of the same name, a concert with the Antwerp-based baroque ensemble BOX.
In composing the album, Clausen says the trio worked on the ‘bones’ of the song, and as the baroque instruments were added, he began to recognise that the music was coming together in the way it had on past albums. Yet with 2014’s The Last Concert show in their hometown of Sønderborg on the Danish island of Als, they signalled their intention to move away from the old album-tour-album cycle, instead working on their radio station The Lake Radio and their new band Liima with drummer Tatu Rönkkö. ‘We were trying to come together and make an album after a long time,’ says Clausen, by way of explaining the new album’s title and intention, ‘but we also realised the strength of