What’s the perfect thing for a Sunday evening to ease you out of the weekend on what is supposed to be Britains stormiest night since Michael Fisher-gate of 1987? Well top of the list, way, way above X-Factor or Strictly, is gently lilting guitars, SILENT SLEEP. Considering commiserating the untimely death of Saint Lou Reed, dedications are made (notably It Breaks Me), easing the assembled crowd in with Elephant 6 Recording Company-ish pop (without 99% of it being noise). However, as great as songs like We’ve Fallen Out Again are… a bit samey, a bit too much ‘Real Music’, a bit too, well, parochial. A classic case of a band needing to do some heavy touring, and hopefully they well as they could be an excellent band, not merely good.
Rather excitingly, instead of a main support the audience are treated to a documentary made during the recording of EFTERKLANG’s last album Piramida, THE GHOST OF PIRAMIDA. Sitting in a darkened Kaz watching a partially subtitled documentary about trying to find the perfect percussion sound on Spitzbergen could have been highly pretentious, but mercifully the Dane’s black sense of humour, the home-footage about the failed mining town of Piramida (replete with subtitled Russian) and Cinéma Vérité-cinematography add a delightfully absurdist flourish to the affair. It even had people chortling, which was the last thing one would have expected from a brooding film set in a frozen, disintegrating town devoid of a population but by Jove it prepared us for the main act.
Well what it prepared us for was a rather Eraserhead-esque entry (in keeping with the cinematic theme); it’s industrial grade ambience which could only have come from a band now based in Berlin and can only be described as cinematic (that word again!). The primal drumming keeps the nuanced, textured sounds floating off into infinity, adding a surreally machine-like efficiency – especially key on tracks like I Was Playing Drums, Raincoats and Living Layer which could so easily evaporate in a puff of ambience at any moment. Instead, Efterklangs they become the perfect accompaniment to a soaked Sunday where plodding delicacy provides a sublime backdrop to the tail end of the weekend’s excesses.
Laurie Cheeseman / @Laurie Cheeseman
