It's a rare treat when you can sit down to chat (albeit on google talk) with an artist you not only admire but who's musical output has influenced your own creative endeavors in the past. That said, it's an even greater treat when that artist introduces you to one of the finest explorations of minimal experimental glitch electronics I have heard in ages. In between yet another busy schedule with Efterklang, I was lucky enough to catch up with lead singer and instrumentalist Casper Clausen in Berlin and discuss one of his most inspiring records, Max De Wardener's 2004 album Where I Am Today.
Listen to the full audio interview here or an edited transcription below.
2011_30_ 01_ Efterklang_Sound_It_Resounds by thesounditresounds
(Outro music: Max De Wardener- Hundreds and Thousands from Where I Am Today)
Sound It Resounds: Casper thank you for taking time out of your Saturday night in Berlin and I understand the album you're going to talk about is an album by Max De Wardener called Where I Am Today so tell us a little bit about this record
Casper : Well thank you first of all for having me on the show. You were asking me for a favorite album of all time, a tough challenge for sure, but this is for sure one album that means a lot to me and one I'm always looking back on and it never really grows old. You can pick it up and put it on and it's this imaginary world of sounds. And it meant a lot because it came out at the same time we were creating Tripper our debut album, in the process of doing that we were consuming a lot of music. This album really filled our heads with a lot of different kind of inspiration. Sadly he hasn't really released anything else but luckily for us we made contact with him and he did a remix of one of our songs.
S.I.R: Which song did he remix?
C: He remixed one of our songs called “Caravan” off the album Parades
C: There's nothing really quite like this album. I'm not really sure the story behind how he did it but from what I picked up, he recorded it in a small church so you have a lot of pipe organ and then he used this very special instrument called cloud chamber bowls, it's kind of like a wine glass and you can make them ring. But instead he kind of knocks them like a bell sound and makes them ring. But Max De Wardener is more like an electronic musician and he uses beats and bass sounds that are synthetic so it's this mix between the acoustic world and this sort of synthetic world that I was blown away by.
S.I.R: I definitely hear a lot of those kind of twinkly electronic elements that are on the Tripper album and you raised an interesting point that I wanted to ask you about. One of the things that has always struck me about Efterklang was how you maintain a real balance between electronics and real instrumentation. Can you talk a bit about that blend of real instrumentation and electronics and why that's important to the band?
C: If we isolate Tripper as a work and the time we made that album, it is us trying to define ourselves and a sound that we could call our own. We're all from a kind of classic background of rock music, like playing in rock n'roll bands so I think moving into that field was very exciting for us. We were listening a lot to, well...the album we're talking about, but also German electronic music like Mouse on Mars and Markus Popp and Oval and that kind of “glitchy” world, but also drawing inspiration from a band called Einsturzende Neubaten. And the great thing for us was to try and pick the best things from both worlds and somehow try and match them and create our own world. It's still a big part of what we try to do and I think if you look at Parades, that's to me, what we wanted to do on Tripper but more full-on. We kind of got better at blending those two worlds.
After Parades we were touring a lot and what we learned about that was the excitement of being a band which we kind of forgot about for awhile. By playing these songs live we learned there was a special energy that we really wanted to capture. So we tried to compose the songs (for latest album Magic Chairs) the way we use to in the computer but the idea was to quickly get them out of the computer before they started growing in there (laughs). But I would like to go back to the mindset of Tripper at some point because there's some amazing things we did at that time which I also hear when I hear this Max De Wardener record. The way we recorded (Tripper & Parades) was very ambitious and the foundation of those ambitions was really based around going to churches and inviting boys choir's (to sing) and having a quartet of strings and going to a field to record to get that real ambient sound, all these kind of things that give the sound texture and makes it sound specific.
S.I.R: I wanted to ask you about the Efterkids project. How did that all come about and maybe you can talk about its goal and how it came together
C: Well the goal of it is to raise awareness of music education in public schools. It came about from one of the label guys at 4AD in New York and he had a friend who was working at this amazing public school in New York and they were thinking of doing something new in music education. They asked us if we could come up with some ideas of contributing and that quickly led to the Efterkids project of us collaborating with the school kids and that's what you can see at the website (www.efterkids.com). There's two songs where we played our part, video recorded in Copenhagen, and it's two songs that include strings but we've left out the string parts and we've put up sheet music so students and teachers can download the sheet music and video and they can project the video of us playing and they can play along. We actually managed to play it twice live on stage with the kids which was an amazing experience for us.
S.I.R: I want to finish off with the latest thing on Efterklang's plate which is a great film collaboration with French filmmaker Vincent Moon called An Island. Tell us a bit about how that came about and what the project is all about.
C: It's basically a documentary about Efterklang and Vincent Moon going to an island for four days and performing and creating musical experiments around the island with the local people in its different locations. It's kind of this mixture between a music film and documentary so it leaves a good space for the experimental film aspects and the experimental music aspects of the film. The way we've chosen to air the film is through something we call private public screenings which basically allows people to screen the film at their home, so they can basically hold their own screening. At the moment there are about 230 screenings set around the world.
S.I.R: It's a very unique way of distributing and disseminating the word of the film in a very viral and social way.
C: Yeah and that will take place in February and March and we'll be able to bring the film with us on tour and screen it before the concerts.
S.I.R: Caspar thank you so much for taking out a part of your Saturday in Berlin and sitting and having a chat. It's been really great and lots of fun.
Check out these important Efterklang online destinations:
An Island official film website
Efterkids - website and info
efterklang.net - Official band site
4AD Records - Label site
Check out some of the Danish bands Casper recommends (audio interview only)
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