Possibly nipping under your radar last year was the release of an album by the Danish band Efterklang, called Parades.

Efterklang is a Danish word that means ‘reverberation’. This is appropriate to the band in many ways, not least because the album cut a swathe through the critical world at the time, the effects of which are still being felt. Drowned in Sound, for God’s sake, gave it ten out of ten, apparently a big deal. Efterklang are your archetypal critical darlings, yet are largely anonymous commercially.

The impact this record had can best be gauged by the fact the album will be performed, ATP Don’t Look Back style, in its entirety in Copenhagen in September. Usually bands have to wait a couple of decades for their album to reach that level of maturity.

In reality, Parades was a fine album, if not quite as momentous as some believed. But you have to admire its grandiose ambition if nothing else.

There are five members of Efterklang but they used 30 guest musicians on the album including three choirs. Parts of the record were recorded in a church, and it took a colossal 18 months to record.

“Some of the songs took three or four months work,” says songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Casper Clausen. “They had to just lay for a bit and then we’d come back to them.” He says the album’s recording took a ‘detailed’ approach, which is a bit of an understatement.

The result was an album that genuinely fits those overused terms like ‘lush’ and ‘textured’. Seemingly every instrument there is has gone in, and in a measured, planned-out way rather than gratuitously. It has been called post-pop, whatever that is, and has all the hallmarks of epicness that characterise Sigur Ros and Arcade Fire. Most of all though, the instrumentation and production at times sounds identical to Sufjan Stevens, so much so that the semi-reclusive American could consider pushing for royalties.
Maybe not.

The key to Efterklang, it seems, is balance, firstly, between electronic music (co-songwriter Mads Brauer is their laptop extraordinaire) and acoustic music.

“Parades was for us an examination of how to blend all the sounds we create, both electronic and acoustic,” says Clausen, “trying to squeeze them together so you couldn’t really tell which was which. We wanted to do something three-dimensional. Parades was constructed in the studio over a year and a half, it felt as though we were sculpting something.”

In this blurring of the lines between technology and tradition, Efterklang undoubtedly succeeded. Whether they succeeded in the other sphere in which they attempted to fuse apparent opposites, is a more problematic question. The aim was for experimentation and accessibility to become easy bedfellows – but, in truth, this album is hard work. You don’t listen to it so much as you study it.

“It’s not something we think so much about. We’re just inspired by pop music as well as music that makes you explore it, makes you listen to it more than just once. That’s the feeling we get when we speak to people. People say they experience different layers after listening 10 or 20 times to a song (from Parades). That is something we are very happy to hear… But we love both sides, it’s the combination that makes it interesting for us.”

Such painstaking deliberation for Parades represented the culmination of a philosophy that was formed when the band moved to Copenhagen from the island of Als (where they had played what Clausen calls “rock music in a more simple way”) in 2001. They had released an EP, Springer, and a debut album in 2005 called Tripper, before fitting together all the nuts and bolts of this exhaustive yet exploratory approach with their sophomore effort.

Parades marks the end of one phase of the band’s career, as there is nowhere for them to go using the same formula. So, it seems the new album Efterklang are currently in the early stages of recording is, with typical thought having gone into it, a deconstruction of the methods this unique band had previously used.

“I think the new direction is to separate them all again,” says Clausen, “try to go more simple and deal with specific electronic sounds and specific acoustic sounds. The new direction is to ‘play’ the music, though that sounds silly. We want to learn the songs and record them rather than record a couple of verses at a time.

“Parades was the culmination of that period, now we want to put our weapons down and go somewhere else.”

Copenhagen, whilst being a town where bands like Efterklang and Figurines (a distinctly different proposition) flourish, is not exactly the centre of the industry. Now, bands like those two enjoy the fact there is a small community of artists to immerse themselves in, as well as the beauty of the place, but getting a record deal is even more difficult than in the recognised hubs of the business in the UK and US. The answer, of course, is to set up your own label.
Efterklang release on their own Rumracket label.

“Financially it’s no big deal to have a label these days,” says Clausen. “For us it feels like a hobby.”

So Clausen and his band go about seeking other artists to put out, including Grizzly Bear from the US and Cacoy from Japan… “That wasn’t available in Europe, we want to present music like that to an audience that hasn’t heard it before.
“It is extremely fruitful for us too, we get a new network every time we put out a new record.”

They are the very definition of DIY music, so much so that they even have to take normal jobs sometimes. This makes the Herculean effort that was Parades all the more remarkable, and overrides any gripes ole Sufjan might have.