Danish orchestral post-rock band Efterklang speak exclusively to Brighton Dome
Guitarist Rasmus Stolberg discusses the band’s trip to deserted mining town Pyramiden, unconventional recording methods and their collaboration with Northern Sinfonia on this month’s podcast.
The story behind Efterklang’s new album Piramida is as fascinating as the record itself. Following a chance request to shoot a music video in the far-flung, deserted settlement of Pyramiden (home of the world’s most northernmost grand piano!) on Spitsbergen – just 1,000km from the North Pole – the band were inspired to collect and record audio samples for the foundation of their latest album.
“One of the things we were interested in was seeing if we could connect a certain location to an album” he says.
“To create the sounds we were banging on a lot of things, making things move, and shaking things…. I’m glad there was no caretaker watching us” laughs Stolberg.
The band spent nine days collecting more than 1000 sounds from Pyramiden’s former fixtures and institutions: the hospital, power plant, swimming pool, canteen, fuel tanks, sawmill, and the infamous grand piano.
“It was one of the main things going up there – finding that piano – and see what music we could get out of it… it’s fun to think I’ve played the world’s most northernmost grand piano and that it’s on our album” explains Stolberg.
“Everything from the organ sounds to what you might think is an analogue synth sound is all generated from stuff up there.”
The Sage, Gateshead’s 35-piece orchestra Northern Sinfonia will join the band at Brighton Dome on Sunday 28 October for The Piramida Concert – something Stolberg is very excited about.
“On the album, we didn’t want to orchestrate too much, because we wanted to keep the focus on a lot of the sounds we had generate ourselves. It was very nice to have this orchestra project, because here we could allow ourselves to orchestrate a lot. It’s been a really nice project and we look forward to playing Brighton.”
For the full interview, listen to Brighton Dome’s October 2012 podcast here.