EFTERKLANG is a live act to the core. Casper Clausen, Mads Brauer and Rasmus Stolberg are experts in giving their audience goose flesh. For me, it is all but impossible to experience the whole magic of their performances on a record. Especially in this case, when EFTERKLANG shared a stage with an orchestra, it poses a challenge – for them, to capture the sound of perfection and for me, as a fan and audience member, to find the right words to write about it. Nevertheless, they did. And I tried.
EFTERKLANG – The Piramida Concert
1. Hollow Mountain
2. Apples
3. Sedna
4. Told To Be Fine
5. The Living Layer + Vælv 6. The Ghost
7. Black Summer8. Between The Walls
9. So
10. Monument
The new live record, The Piramida Concert, from EFTERKLANG arose out of the Piramida Concerts Tour they played in 2012, together with well-known orchestras on three continents. EFTERKLANG is famous for their predilection for experiments. Even before Piramida was produced, the three guys from Denmark tried out different places and sources to find inspiration and substances for their extraordinary and sophisticated sound. After heading back to Berlin from making field recordings at Spitsbergen in Norway, EFTERKLANG took their time to produce the studio-album Piramida. During that phase of song writing, producing and merging, the Opera Theatre of Sydney asked them to do a live performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in May 2012 – before the album was completely finished. Within six months, EFTERKLANG accomplished their outstanding record and finally headed off to Australia.
Inspired by the request of Sydney Opera, the band decided to play an orchestral tour in Europe and NYC. Certainly Denmark – the home of EFTERKLANG – was part and parcel of this tour. To capture the special ghost of the orchestral version of Piramida, the band decided to record their concert in the Royal Academy of Music Concerts Hall in Copenhagen. The outcome of this is The Piramida Concert, which is going to be released digital and as a Deluxe-Vinyl-Edition designed by Danish artists Hvass&Hannibal in June 10th.
Like with the original record Piramida, it is hard to figure out the highlights of this live record. The Piramida Concert deserves to be named as a complete work of art, like other records by EFTERKLANG. Those who already know Piramida are going to detect some different and eclectic facets within the songs. The new live record is as coherent as the studio album, without being just an image supplemented by an orchestra. EFTERKLANG put a lot of effort in it, to create arrangements especially for the orchestra in a central and cohesive function.
To permute the concept of The Piramida Concert, the band asked the composers Missy Mazzoli and Karsten Fundal to support them. In addition to the process of transforming Piramida into an orchestral masterpiece, Fundal arranged the exclusive composition called Vælv, to be played by the orchestra on its own. Another exclusive aspect of the live record is the song So, which evolved from the studio album sessions but was not put on the album. It perfectly matches with the other tracks and converges with them into a meticulous but similarly agile sound experience, obviously bearing the trademark of EFTERKLANG. The Piramida Concert has a kind of ceremonial grandness, by touching you in depth.