Back in March, Off The Beaten Tracks took an almost deserved week off to head over to Austin, Texas for the South By Southwest festival. We’d been chatting to our friends from My Old Kentucky Blog, and since they’d decided not to do anything at SXSW with their Laundromatinee series of sessions,they asked if we’d like to go and film some bands so we could share the results. That’s downright neighbourly, we thought, and off we went.
We did five sessions in total over the four days. Those will be going up in the coming weeks, but to open it all up, we were dead chuffed to bag one of our favourite bands at the moment, the glorious and inventive Efterklang.
All the way from Copenhagen, the Efterklangers had been fully warned about us, that we hated recording drums or electronic instruments because they sound rubbish outdoors, that we liked bands who arrived with portable instruments, and that we usually need to be able to get the sessions done quickly, as we’re often not 100% allowed to be in the locations we choose. Efterklang took that information on board, had a think about it and cheerfully showed up with flightcases, a synthesizer and various percussion bits and bobs. It was one of those afternoons.
Since we now needed power, and a roof, we ditched our initial location ideas and managed to persuade the very nice people who ran the AOL Seed Lounge, based inside Austin’s cavernous Convention Centre to let us take over half their exhibit and generally make a bit of a mess.
After an epic period of faffing around uncoiling cables, clapping, playing with synths, doing flute scales, waiting for an acoustic guitar to show up, losing the acoustic guitar, finding it again, drinking AOL’s fridge completely dry, dropping things, and admiring the collapsible furniture we eventually got round to recording the band. Well worth the wait as it turned out.
Not usually an acoustic-sounding band, we got two tracks from February’s Magic Chairs album, the woozy and floaty ‘Alike’, with its insistent thrum of rhythm, and the sparser, more staccato ‘Raincoats’, with its syncopated jerkiness offset with some jolly acapella shouting. The band seemed to think this was the first ever acoustic airing of this track, so we’ll probably claim that as an exclusive of some kind.
The second half of ‘Raincoats’ – where they bang a flightcase with a big stick – might sound bit weird, but for a nice change, this isn’t our fault.
Efterklang are on tour at the moment and will no doubt pop up at a bundle of festivals over the summer, too. The album Magic Chairs is out now through 4AD.
4ad have asked us not to podcast these videos, so unfortunately if you’re a podcast subscriber, you’ll still have to stream these on the site.
