Efterklang
Interview Hannah Lanfear
Photography Mads Hilmer
Efterklang’s sophomore album Parades (The Leaf Label, 2007) was a magnificent record of depth and finesse that graced many a magazine’s year-end list. At times melancholy and with a classical lean, you could be forgiven for thinking Efterklang were a serious bunch. Yet with their new release Magic Chairs (4AD, 2010) they’ve cast aside their bookishness and made a sunny pop record that on first listen has you at hello. You can expect a grumble or two from staid fans, but Magic Chairs is marvellous; it’s a record for the people, filled with glorious melodies and poignant choruses leaving the band set for a more substantial success than mere acclaim.
Leading the march of Magic Chairs’ single releases is “Modern Drift”, a track that’s debilitating in its beauty and has a video that leaves you feeling like your soul just got a spring clean. On the cusp of its release, ’SUP caught up with Rasmus Stolberg (bass, guitar) and Casper Clausen (vocals) in a snow-clad Copenhagen to guzzle orangey beers and talk shop.
The video for “Modern Drift” is based on a film by Danish director Jørgen Leth, who seems to be a Danish national treasure. Can you tell us how it came about?
Rasmus: It is made by his son, Kristian Leth, but using images his father created. His son is a really good friend of ours. He’s a musician as well as a director. His father gave him permission to use his old footage and he’s now done two videos using the old footage. It’s a lovely setup.
It’s truly beautiful. I really liked that the images are so resonant – once you’ve seen it, the video stays with you when you hear the song. The aesthetics that accompany your music seem to be really important to you.
Rasmus: We often have people that write to us to ask to do videos we didn’t ask for. They ask if they can and we say, ‘Sure, go ahead,’ and if we like it we take it on as our official video.
Is that what happened with “Doppelganger”? It didn’t appear until four years after the record was released.
Rasmus: That’s exactly what happened with “Doppelganger”. Casper actually found it online. It actually started out as some guy’s holiday movie, and he’d put the track over his holiday footage.
It’s a fucking awesome video. He’s done a great job.
Casper: It is. We redid some stuff to make it less personal to him, but it’s great.
It must be a wonderful position to be in to have people come to you offering to make you a music video. These days there’s rarely a budget, so to have someone offer to do it for the love of art is a real compliment.
Casper: We had a great experience with a song called “Illuminant”. A guy did it all by himself, just asking if he could pick a song and do a video for it.
Rasmus: We didn’t know him. We didn’t hear anything from him for six months. He just picked a track and vanished, then one day returned with this crazy video using stop motion puppets. It’s a song you would never do a video for. It’s a weird song, but when he came back the video really explained the song for so many people.
Casper: Some songs suffer put to a video, but other songs really benefit with a video. When you put pictures to music sometimes it helps your understanding and, as you said, can really stay with you. It would feel strange to spend $10,000 to make a video with no certainty of how many people will see it, and it’s basically a free something you offer.
Hasn’t the Internet changed that though, in reaching a wider audience?
Casper: Yeah, but it also changed the aspect of videos. Going back 20 years, a video was the only exposure you had as a band. If you wanted to get any visual exposure you had to have a video. These days it’s like anyone who has a digital camera can make a video, and though you can make very nice videos without much of a budget, the market is overflowing with videos. It’s saturated.
Rasmus: If you go and spend money on it, it feels really awkward. You know it could suck or maybe only be okay, or could be super great and you can get a lot out of it, but it feels stupid to spend a lot of money on videos.
It seems like you use your friends’ talents to help you with your art direction. Isn’t it your girlfriend Rasmus that did the album artwork for Parades?
Rasmus: Yeah! Nice research!
Casper: That’s not really something we tell people.
Rasmus: The last two projects she did with her studio, Hvass & Hannibal, as two friends working together and before that she was doing the artwork on her own, but she’s done all our stuff the last four years.
You did a performance with the Danish National Orchestra. I saw the footage and it looked magical. Can you tell us about how it came about?
Casper: That’s actually Hvass & Hannibal that did the design there too. The visual part of it is very much their work. The project came about when we were contacted by the Danish Orchestra. We’d been trying to make something happen with an orchestra for some time. They wanted to work with us so we had some meetings to find out what we could achieve. We had this dream of playing Parades how it sounded, but live, which was a real challenge. Parades is a very constructed work, with many layers, made over one and a half years and recorded layer by layer as a studio album.
It looks so much fun. I love the gnome hats you made the orchestra wear. At one point the footage cuts to an old guy playing the cornet with his cheeks puffed out and his conical hat on. He looks really pissed off about the fact he’s dressed as a gnome!
Rasmus (laughing): It was a really big deal, waiting for the right moment to introduce the hats. Everyone was worried they wouldn’t accept. They can do that. If the orchestra doesn’t like it they can rally together, stand up and say, ‘We’re not doing that!’
Casper: They work in a very different way than us, for example. Because they’re workers, they wake up in the morning and they go to work.
Rasmus: They have a spokesperson (puts on a reedy voice), ‘I’m sorry, but it’s five minutes past schedule. We need overtime or we’re all going to leave now!’ It’s very different. It’s all about winning them over, about making them friends. One of the guys said early on to us, ‘You should take them out for a beer or something.’
Sixty of them? That’s a lot of beers!
Rasmus: Yeah, it was an expensive round! I think we managed to get them on our side though. I think it worked out.
Casper: It was strange for us as musicians, frustrating, as there’s long periods of time where everyone in the orchestra isn’t doing anything, doing crosswords or texting, and it’s annoying to work with, but when it’s time, and they’re finally on stage, something happens – something really special, everything just lifts to another level.
Were you expecting the success of Parades, particularly with the critics?
Rasmus: Sales weren’t that high, it’s true, but we got good acclaim from the album. From the album before we had good success in Sweden, Denmark and here and there, but Parades really established us in the U.S. and internationally.
And Denmark?
Rasmus: Denmark – I mean, I think a lot of indie fans or experimental music fans like us but some of them hate us because we’re not from Brooklyn or whatever! But some of them just don’t know who we are; we’re not massive here at all. I think that could change with the next album.
Yeah, compared to Parades and Tripper [The Leaf Label, 2004], this new record seems instantly loveable. I mean, with Parades it felt like the more you listened to it you got more out of it. It rewarded you, but with Magic Chairs, it’s instant.
Rasmus (suddenly pointing at the beer in front of him): What’s this?
That’s a Picon Biere. It’s a beer but with a shot of Amer Picon in. It’s a regular lager with a shot in it. The first beer on a hang-over always tastes dreadful. This makes it perfectly delicious.
Rasmus (looking pleased): It’s really good.
It is rather.
Casper: We wanted to simplify our music and also make something that was easier for us to play because Parades was really a studio project. We wanted to make something where we could actually play the songs together. On the U.S. tour in spring we tried out our new songs, and when you do that you need to make decisions pretty early on to make songs, not music that floats around on a computer. It became simpler because when you write as a band, there are less details. I mean, there are still details. We like details. People who have been at our concerts over the last two years will still recognize Efterklang in the new record, whereas the folks who’ve listened to Tripper and Parades might think it’s a big departure in style for us, but I hope they’ll still recognise the signatures of Efterklang on the record. It’s very important for us to not discard our past. We’ve just been selective about what we’re taking with us.
I love that on the live performances that you offer such a lot of energy. The style of your records is quite downbeat, but the performances are really kinetic.
Rasmus: I think people are often surprised because we have so much fun and enjoy playing. We’re not very good at playing it cool so we just enjoy ourselves and have fun on stage. I also think with Magic Chairs, we’re allowing ourselves the chance to really enjoy it. We like good melodies and great pop songs, but we’ve never been able to incorporate that into our music. It didn’t seem to fit, but now we’ve realized that it doesn’t matter.We can’t do anything that isn’t Efterklang. It’s the only band each of us play in – we’re specialists at being in our own band! We couldn’t play anything else.
Do you like to get involved in the art direction? It seems to be an integral part of Efterklang.
Rasmus: It’s very important to us. In the early days we’d put together the concept and then have people help us with it. When you put in so much time and energy into making music, you want to make sure the way this music is presented to people is just as high quality and matches the way you feel about the music. The way Hvass & Hannibal work on the artwork is very similar to the way we work with the music. It’s a lot about intuition. The way they work, they go on and on until they feel it’s there. They won’t stop until they really like it. Now we’ve worked with them so much we can relax about it and just leave it to them, because we know that they’ll hear the music and then come up with ideas for it. Which means we can spend our time on writing more songs! And touring! It’s getting very busy being in Efterklang.
What do you get up to when you’re not Efterklang-ing?
Rasmus: That’s the thing. I feel I’ve been doing this since July 2007 almost non-stop.
Casper: For me even earlier, actually.
Rasmus: It feels like we’ve been doing this for three years straight now, not doing anything else. I do stuff on the side but it’s very much on the side. None of us have jobs. It makes no sense for us to have a job because we’re on tour so often, and when we’re not we record or rehearse. We’re right in the middle of this place where we’re making a living, which is nice, but, well – actually it’s very nice right now. It’s working out. You’re always like, ‘Do I need a job?’ But if you get a job you no longer have the time for the band.
Casper: You get to be your own CEO in your own company as a band, and there are always things to do. You can write a new song or make an old song better, or do promotion and on and on, always something—
Rasmus: Work on the website, interact with fans, remixes, contacting other bands.
Casper: We also do that because we enjoy it. We like to push ourselves. We like to be a little ambitious about what we do. We’re pretty good at working late nights and getting up and starting again, and maybe that’ll change in five years but right now it’s working.
Rasmus: I think what’s important is that of the four core members, none of us have kids! I think if you want to be a rock musician and have kids, you really need to be at a high level to make it work. You need to be able to go on short tours and play for a lot of people, ‘cause those long eight-week tours where you play shitty places and come home with hardly any cash to show for it aren’t worth it.
Which do you prefer: stand-alone shows or the festivals?
Casper: They’re so different. The festivals are fragmented, hardly like a tour. We play like a weekend with two or three shows, then next weekend one, or maybe a concert in between. I think maybe venue concerts for us are more like a journey. We’re in a bus for a month or a month and a half, while the summer period is more broken up playing, then going home and doing something else.
Can you tell us about your label Rumraket and how it came about?
Rasmus: It sort of started out of necessity. We did an EP back in spring 2003, our debut. We didn’t actually plan on getting a label to put it out. It was just a demo recording to hear what we were doing so we could send it to venues as a sample to get to play there, but we ended up really liking the material and wanted to release it. We ended up doing 500 handmade covers and when we were prepared to do the CDs we felt it would look more official if there was a label on the CDs! We came up with the name Rumraket, which means space rocket in Danish. I can’t remember why. (To Casper) I think you just liked the word, and then later on we wanted to do the same thing with Tripper but right in the middle of it the Leaf Label came and picked us up. By releasing Tripper worldwide along with the tours we did and the contacts we got, we felt maybe we could actually use our own label for something which was when we started signing other bands and getting distribution deals. People that were working with Efterklang were asking ‘Can I also work with your label?’ So it was really easy for us. That was when Casper and the guys were deeply into making Parades. I wasn’t involved that much, because I don’t compose music at the same time as recording, so I had all this time to sign bands and get into releasing records. Right now because we’re touring so much I’m scaling it down. There’s just not the time for it. At the moment we’re not making money from it. I mean, ideally I could hire someone and that person could run the label and we could just decide what to put out. That would be the dream, but we’re not there yet.
Did you consider putting out this record on your own label?
Rasmus: It is.
I thought it was on 4AD?
Rasmus: Yeah it is, but in Scandinavia it’s out on our own label. That’s what we use it for now. It’s our base, Efterklang’s base. And it’s just a way for us, I mean, especially on the old albums, the market is not very big but by controlling so many rights ourselves in our own country it’s a lot easier for us to make the money back we spend on recording the album.
Casper: And it helps to, as we say in Denmark, keep the potato hot.
Say wha’?
Casper: Well, the more we use it, the more we can still use it for helping other people. We’re not sure on which level, whether it’s putting other people’s music by releasing it or putting stuff out in a different way. It’s nice to have it there.
Rasmus: It’s also because we really like doing a lot of things ourselves. We’re not afraid of it, and our label in Scandinavia has a better set up than Beggars’ for example, 4AD, so it’s obvious for us to go ahead and do the release because we know it better.
I’ve only just moved to Copenhagen. Can you tell me how to spend the perfect day out?
Rasmus: You said you’re going to see Japandroids? Where’s that?
Loppen.
Rasmus: Yeah that’s a great place to go out.
I was there to see We Were Promised Jetpacks last week.
Rasmus: That’s a great name.
And they were super.
Rasmus: You know, the perfect thing – get onto the S train for 20 minutes and you get to the park from the “Modern Drift” video. That’s what you should do. There’s a castle and you get to see all the good spots. There’s a roller coaster there too. Every Dane, especially those living in Copenhagen, knows that park really well. It’s not a natural park; it’s been designed to be an old hunting park for the Danish royalty. There’s a lot of deer. They’re really human friendly so they come really close. Actually it would be pretty easy hunting because the deer come right up to you.
Er, that’s surely not exactly what you want when you’re hunting?
Rasmus: No, exactly. ‘Get away!’
Have there been any places you’ve travelled to as a band that have resonated with you particularly?
Rasmus: That’s one of the beautiful things about the band. When we’d just started our friends had finished their studies and would go travelling in Asia or whatever, the U.S., Australia, and we would stay home and work at jobs and spend all our money on instruments, all our time on music. We couldn’t travel, but now, because we spent those hard years, we can travel as a band. We did a Chinese tour, and it was incredible to get to go to China.
Casper: It was great inspiration.
Rasmus: The nice thing is that no matter where you go, we come as a band and put on a concert, so where ever we go we meet people that are alike – people that think the same way we do or have the same values, people we can relate to. You feel much more a part of the world than if you stay at home only relating to people of your own country. The beginning of this album started in Tel Aviv. We got invited down there to be artists in residents at this festival. We’d been down there two weeks in the studio and were to do a concert at the end. We were very much in doubt whether we should cancel this thing and boycott it because of what was going on in the Gaza Strip. But we decided to do it, because that was exactly what the festival was about – an anti-war, cross-culture way of getting people to get together, to understand each other. And we learned going down there, that even in Israel, a country we felt we should boycott, there were like-minded people who felt about music the way we do.
I really like going to a gig and exploring a city by its music venues. I guess you get to do that as standard.
Rasmus: If you go to see an underground band and there are a hundred people there, you know they’re people you can relate to so you feel less alienated in a city.
What are your hopes for the new record?
Casper: We’ve been playing this game for seven years. We’re not hoping to be millionaires tomorrow. I think it’s always been moving along at its own tempo. I think it’s been like that with every record. I don’t think any of us, after Tripper, thought it would ever just explode and be this big band. To be honest it’s not something that we dare to hope for, we just hope that it will, you know, continue to grow.
