When: 7pm on Wednesday 2 March 2022
Where: Gorilla, 54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester M1 5WW

We’re delighted to be welcoming Efterklang back to Manchester!

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 finest and most direct melodic moments to date.

With their ability to bring in guests and session musicians restricted, Efterklang had to challenge their usual creative process and accept their own limitations. Recorded over the course of five trips to residential studio Real Farm on the island of Møn, south of Copenhagen, the genesis of Windflowers was back to basics and became an exercise in putting their vast and dynamic experience to play. 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.

Efterklang’s constant innovation and openness for collaborating extends past the band’s core members and into the world of the listener. 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.

Whether it’s their early, more electronic-driven post-rock beginnings (Tripper, 2004) or their later field recording excavations at an abandoned settlement not far from the North Pole (Piramida, 2012), Danish pop adventurers Efterklang express boundless enthusiasm with each radical new undertaking and when they take the stage to perform live.

In 2019, they released their fifth album Altid Sammen (translated: forever together), which took them on a long European tour playing sold out shows in venues like the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and London’s Barbican Concert Hall before the pandemic shut everything down.

Just recently, the band informed their fans that they will be releasing a new album later in 2021 and while we wait for further information, they have announced an extensive European tour, from October 2021 to March 2022.

Consisting of childhood friends Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg, the band sustains a forever-curious approach to its sound and identity. Over the years, they have become a true force of nature when taking to the stage to perform live, their concerts are as beautiful as they are raw and communal. Performing to an audience is not enough for Efterklang – their wish is to perform with the audience. The ambition is to create a genuine feeling of togetherness via music and to break down the distance between performer and audience. This applies in particular to their concerts, but is also expressed through their popular Sock Society and their Private-Public Screenings project where more than 2000 fans helped organise official screenings for their music-films An Island (Vincent Moon, 2011) and The Ghost of Piramida (Andreas Koefoed), 2012).

We all miss live music and there are few better representatives of the format than Efterklang and their amazing live band. They are eager to get back on the stage to perform both old and newly written songs.

Local support comes from One Little Atlas (aka OLA). One Little Atlas are from Manchester, consisting of Dean Jones and Kevan Hardman. Their music is characterised by sweeping aural soundscapes and beat driven tracks. These elements intertwine with ethereal vocals, reflective guitar melodies and lush hypnotic synths.

Starting back in 2013, they have since released albums, EPs and composed scores to films Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka, performing these soundtracks live alongside screenings. The original works also saw them play at RNCM, John Rylands Library and Whitworth Art Gallery, performing live commissioned works, plus for new audiences at Bluedot and Manchester International festivals. In 2022 they’ll be releasing a new single in April, EP in summer and album in late autumn.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult. 

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm,  WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

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