Windflowers Efterklang

• 1 Alien Arms 04:59
• 2 Beautiful Eclipse 03:10
• 3 Hold Me Close When You Can 04:32
• 4 Lady of the Rocks 01:16
• 5 Dragonfly 03:08
• 6 Living Other Lives 05:38
• 7 Mindless Center 05:03
• 8 House on a Feather 04:04
• 9 Åbent Sår 07:51
• Total Runtime 39:41

Info for Windflowers

Every year as spring arrives, a sea of tiny flowers blossom across the Danish forest floor. They’re an explosion of colour, a symbol of hope and change, disappearing as quickly as they arrived and exposing the constant cycle of nature. They are known colloquially as windflowers.

For over twenty years, Efterklang have been pushing the barriers of experimental, electronic, emotional chamber-pop. Announcing their sixth studio album Windflowers, their first for City Slang, the Danish trio of Mads Brauer, Rasmus Stolberg and Casper Clausen continue a creative journey that’s brought them closer together, even as their lives grow apart. Channelling the motifs of hope and change its namesake flora represents, the album sees their many years of collaboration and experimentation distilled into some of their most concise, most direct and confidently Efterklang-style pop songs to date.

As Efterklang, like most of the world, watched their 2020 summer schedule dissipate, they turned their attention to creating something new. With what felt like all the time in the world and nothing to prove, Casper and Mads set about sketching ideas for songs, just to see where it would take them.

With their ability to bring in guests and session musicians restricted, Efterklang had to challenge their usual creative process and accept their own limitations. The genesis of Windflowers was back to basics and became an exercise in putting their vast and dynamic experience to play. Self-producing the record, they reconnected with the playfulness and joy of making music together, embracing their distinct pop sensibilities and creating their finest melodic moments to date.

The album finds Casper singing in English again, for the most part. It’s rich and intimate, the sound of three friends finding each other at a time when the world around them felt unstable. The record is about existing, alone, together and in nature. It’s about reconnecting, and letting each other grow.

With no set deadline and no boundaries, they were able to create freely. Windflowers is inspired by the pure joy of music. Its creation was escapist playtime and the result was over seventy new song ideas, more demos than they’d ever started an album with. It took two days just to listen through to everything. “We never talked about what songs shouldn’t be on the album, we talked only about the songs that should be on the album, and that was the key,” says Rasmus.

Over the course of recording the band made five trips to residential studio Real Farm on the island of Møn, south of Copenhagen. They worked across all the seasons, experiencing everything from bright sunshine to freezing snowstorms. “You feel the elements much more when you’re not in the city, and it’s good to be reminded that we’re all a part of nature,” says Mads.

“Hold Me Close When You Can” marks a striking moment in the tracklist. Casper devised the chords and melody during a radio soundcheck in Brussels in January 2020, where Rasmus immediately heard its potential. The song was saved as a voice note and the band battled with structure and instrumentation in the studio, working with live band member Christian Balvig on the string arrangements, until it all unfolded before them. Beautiful, eloquent, and rousingly sentimental, Casper’s voice is both fragile and full of power. “It’s a really emotional song and it still can get to me” says Mads.

Conversely, “Living Other Lives” is a standout burst of playful pop. An admittedly fun track to work on, it meshes dizzying sound textures alongside infectious energy and a euphoric chorus. “House on a Feather'' is stunning with an edge of strange, one of the songs that came together effortlessly for the band. While on “Beautiful Eclipse”, Mads experimented in the studio, sampling instrumental loops from Altid Sammen, burning them to CD, and then scratching the disc to sample a weird and unrecognisable digitally distorted Efterklang of the past.

The slim list of collaborators on the record includes live band members, Bert Cools, Øyunn, Christian Balvig and Indre Jurgelevičiūtė. They also brought in one of Denmark's finest violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen. On “Dragonfly”, Casper is joined by Karen Beldring who adds a different texture to the vocals, and for album closer Åbent Sår, they joined forces with electronic musician The Field, who opened the track into a spiralling, ambient banger. “I’ve never really figured out how to do the four to the floor in a cool way. When we do it ourselves it just still sounds like us trying to do something else. He really nailed it,” says Mads.

Without the distractions of the city, the band found time to properly connect. They went on walks, swam, made food and went to the beach. The residential studio removed their chance for escape once the work day ended. “We spend a lot of time together on emails, on tour, but there’s always this strange balance between work and then being someone that made a band purely because we were friends. And to spend that time in Møn, I felt that was very, very important,” says Casper.

Friends from school, Efterklang released their debut album Tripper in 2004, a dynamic record of sparse electronica and rich harmony which won them international acclaim. Over the years they’ve grown a devout fan base, not only with their cinematic, spacious and captivating compositions, but with their enduring experimentation and inclusivity. After releasing 2012’s Piramida, the trio took time away from the traditional album cycle, forming Liima with Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö, co-writing the immersive opera LEAVES: The Colour of Falling as part of the Copenhagen Opera Festival and participating in the Berlin-based PEOPLE festival. That journey culminated in 2019’s Altid Sammen, a collaboration with Belgian baroque ensemble B.O.X which grew into an Efterklang record.

Efterklang’s constant innovation and openness for collaborating extends past the band’s core members and into the world of the listener. Across their history, the group has engaged in ideas that break tradition, introducing their audience as part of the creative process. From encouraging DIY screenings of documentary An Island to championing musical education with their Efterkids initiative to forming audience choirs on their last tour, they’re constantly pursuing moments of connection. The essence of togetherness reverberates through the band’s past and present, and has never felt so vital.

Now sharing new music through their Developed platform, fans are invited to collaborate and respond as they listen to the new tracks for the first time. Collaboration and community has always been the compass of Efterklang, and the group keeps looking for new ways to build a meaningful correspondence with their audience, to be inventive and inclusive. “We don’t want to play to people, we want to perform and make music with people,” Rasmus explains.

After all their years together, Mads, Casper and Rasmus share the real intimacy of family. Windflowers is proof that connection and community can triumph over adversity, and the result is something truly beautiful. (Written by Jen Long)

Efterklang

Efterklang
Marking the group’s return seven years after their last studio release – a period of transition, of high adventures and creative questing – Efterklang’s fifth album Altid Sammen is their finest yet. Bold and ambitious, yet engaging on a primal and emotional level, the album is steeped in the experimentation that has been their trademark since their debut album, 2004’s Tripper, but is more elemental than they’ve yet dared to be. The music of Altid Sammen (the title means “Always Together”) is deep and sonorous. Their trademark tapestry of acoustic and electronic elements, woven together so expertly one hardly notices how each strengthens the other, has never sounded more accomplished. Sounds from the baroque and digital eras strike perfect harmonies together, bound together by Casper Clausen’s warm, weathered and wise vocals. The album will be released on the band's own label Rumraket in the Nordic and on 4AD in rest of the world.

Approached by B.O.X – a Belgian ensemble founded by lute player Pieter Theuns, performing new music with baroque orchestration – Casper Clausen (vocal), Mads Brauer (synth, electronics) and Rasmus Stolberg (bass) composed material for a joint performance at Theuns’ own mixMass festival in Antwerp in January 2018. But the music they began writing for this performance soon took on a life of its own. The performance left Efterklang fired-up to commit this work to tape. “We walked offstage feeling super-elevated,” says Stolberg. “Let’s get into a studio and document this.” Their initial plan was to record the album solely in collaboration with the B.O.X ensemble. But later that summer the trio appeared at Berlin’s PEOPLE festival, a 7-day experience where musicians from around the world (including Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, Beirut’s Zach Condon, Justin Vernon, Feist and the Dessner brothers, along with 150 more artists) collaborate and perform in various new ensembles. As well as performing with various friends new and old, the trio also played together as Efterklang, revisiting the new songs, but this time with other musicians onstage. “And we realised then, these songs deserved our full attention – the scope of possibilities was inspiring,” says Stolberg. “It was time to make a new Efterklang album.”

This album contains no booklet.