Natalye Childress chats to Berlin-based experimental troupe Efterklang about their new album, Piramida…

It was early 2010 when Efterklang, a Danish experimental indie rock band consisting of childhood friends Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen, and Rasmus Stolberg, received an email from a Swedish film director containing photos of a town located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

Situated in the Svalbard archipelago, 1,300 kilometers beneath the North Pole, and in a space where the Norwegian Sea, Greenland Sea, and the Arctic Ocean converge, the island has several claims to fame.

It has the northernmost airport with public scheduled flights; it is home to a global seed vault; it uses no transportation around the island other than planes, snowmobiles and boats; there are six national parks which overlap it; and it is home to the world’s northernmost grand piano.

But the subject of the email wasn’t any of these things. Instead, it was about Piramida­—a former coal mining settlement, abandoned in 1998 by its Russian owners and left to become a ghost town.

Having just released its third full-length, Magic Chairs, the band didn’t immediately do anything with the knowledge of Piramida. Instead, the idea lay dormant in the minds of the members until it came time to write a new album. Only then did it begin to lay the groundwork for what would be the trio’s first album since arriving in Berlin two years ago.

Vocalist Clausen sat down on the day of the album’s release party to discuss the album, which came out this week, and how it’s influenced by both Piramida and Berlin.

What was the inspiration behind using Piramida as the starting point for your album? 

We saw these pictures and were just sort of, intrigued. The light up there is very special, so you had this amazing nature sight of a big glacier and two huge mountains, and then this small settlement in the middle, like a ghost town, where people left 13 years ago. So this whole idea of this place was just so intriguing: the children’s swings and, it was like, there was something really, really unique about it and those pictures kept haunting us for a while afterward.

In the beginning of 2011, we started thinking of what kind of album we’d like to do next, and usually when we do a new album, we sit around a table and say, “Any ideas?” And the first thing that usually tricks us when we want to do an album is to find something that really fascinates us, something we’re really excited about doing. Usually it’s quite practical. In this case, we figured out that we really wanted to do an album that was based around a specific location, so we would start at that location, and from there take out inspiration in sounds and so on. And then came to mind these pictures we saw, from Piramida. We didn’t write any songs before going there. We just went there with a blank sheet of paper.

What was the town like when you arrived? Was it in a condition you expected it to be in? Was it anything you had imagined?

The place looks empty, as a ghost town is, I guess. And it’s very silent. There’s a few workers from the Russian coal mine company that st…