Denmark’s EFTERKLANG have recorded five pieces of what might be underestimated as interlude or incidental music. Originating as material to add variety to their album-based live set on tour, there is a gentle consistency in these recordings that allows them to stand very well on their own behalf as a short but very complete album.
The opening is deceptively hesitant. The music shifts, tentatively at first, between mechanical electronica and orchestral sound. But a mood of expectancy and hopeful spirit steadily emerges – rather as it does with SILVER MOUNT ZION or GOD SPPED! YOU BLACK EMPEROR. EFTERKLANG’S solo violin and occasionally astringent harmony singing are similarly redolent of Montreal and the Constellation musicians. I can also hear sounds that lovers of ANIMAL COLLECTIVE and BATTLES would recognise and appreciate. In third track “Hands Playing Butterfly” something reminded me of the film soundtrack that SIGUR ROS used as introductory music for their stage entry on a tour back in 2001. This is helpful reference material I think.
August comparisons notwithstanding, by the time the whole recording has been once through, I’m recognising this is as distinctly EFTERKLANG’s own presentation of complex, emotionally focussed and very inventive music. It has a gentle minimalism, but with far more variation in tone colours and instrumentation than most artists would tackle. It’s easy these days for popular bands to emulate orchestral music (and, sadly, what is becoming known as “post-rock”. But EFTERKLANG (like SIGUR ROS) tend to honour the complexity and technical demands of “classical” work as well as the superficial ambience that satisfies lesser exponents. On “Hands Playing Butterfly”, for example, the simple piano part is played with a warm confident touch and the violin holds forth with a fully expressive intonation.
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“Towards a Bare Hill” has a lovely choir of natural voices, like a dispossessed sea shanty, accompanied by inventive percussion, strong brass playing and beguilingly spiky electronica. It’s my favourite, anyway. It’s followed by the very pretty “Jojo” that evokes Japanese purity in its opening bars and builds towards a fairly huge choir of rising voices, drums and that distinctive violin before returning to the pastoral sounds of a dreamlike and exotic Far East.
UNDER GIANT TREES is being released worldwide as a limited edition of 4,500 embossed, individually numbered CDs in a lovely fold-out card wallet, and as a limited edition of 1,200 copies on white vinyl. The artwork matches the music in having complex combinations of simple beauty and disturbing undercurrents of apocalyptic awareness. Look (and listen) carefully and the idyllic woodlands reveal the global threats of industry and agribusiness.
www.efterklang.net
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