Danish band Efterklang are currently on the road in Europe touring recent album Piramida. Frontman Capser Stolberg (right) is sending Q this exclusive tour diary…
Greetings from the land of cheese and chocolate. We left EU & crossed the Swiss/german border (not an easy task) straight into Basel just on the other side. Tonight we’re playing in the city’s former banana storage house, now called Hinterhof. This is the first stop on a tour taking us around most parts of Europe and North America, 60 shows in all before summer. Going to be real exciting. Over the next five days we’ll explore the alp land and let you know what we find.
Should you ever go to Basel, make sure to swing by the restaurant Viertel-Kreis (Gundeldingerstr. 505). Super sweet staff and beautiful local food and wines. Above is Christoph, the owner of Viertel-Kreis and Casper [Clausen, singer] with some tasty cress grown on a rooftop in the city using water from a fish basin. Fascinating eco system. Reminded me of a TED talk by the cook Dan Barber, How I Fell In Love With A Fish”.
On this Swiss leg of the tour we are also continuing a new project of ours that at the moment goes by the name EfterPost. It is a free post service connecting our audiences in the different cities we play in.
For free we pass on notes, letters and gifts from one city’s audience to the audience of the next city. We read the messages out loud from the stage. Sometimes they are for everyone and other times they are for specific members of the audience. Like this nice note here that we picked up in Basel…
Dear Q reader,
Greetings from the land of cheese, chocolate and tunnels. We’re stuck in traffic inside a mountain somewhere outside Zürich, on our way to Luzern, where we’re playing tonight.
Over the past two days we’ve been playing in former cinemas, and enjoyed the green room view from the former projection rooms. Switzerland is still absolutely unbeatable when it comes to the gastronomic part of the touring – which is very important for us.
Yesterday in St Gallen a Swiss music magazine took us to a splendid restaurant called Lagerhaus for local lake fish and beef, and also to talk a bit about food on tour. An interview for nice food, is a nice trade, we suggest more magazines adopt this kind of feature…
We had the pleasure of trying a rather bizzare invention called “The Buttkicker”, a vibrator that you attach to a chair and then it adds a completely new dimension to you bass or kick drum playing, you literally feel it in your butt (Rasmus’ face expression tells you everything)
Sbrinz is a wonderful swiss cheese!
We’ve seen a lot of different hotel rooms over the years, but this one in Baden, added a new feature, a window directly from the bed room to the shower.
Much love from all of us,
Efterklang
Dear Q readers
Greetings from the land of cheese, chocolate, tunnels and Röstigraben. Here’s our final tour diary from Switzerland. Our concert in Südpol, Luzern, was an amazing experience. Sometimes there’s magical collective connection a group of people where time and space dissolves, yesterday we forgot ourselves, joined the audience and let the music play itself, beautiful stuff.
The venue itself is a former slaughterhouse, and could very well have been haunted by thousands of ghost cows, but its past only shows from the outside. Inside it’s totally peaceful & beautifully re-designed, huge bright rooms and windows facing the stunning mountain sight surrounding the city of Luzern.
Today we’re in Geneva, the last stop on our Swiss tour. This is the French part of the country, hinted by an absolutely perfect croissant on a random gas stop. In our postal service project Efterpost, where we bring messages from the audience in one venue to the next, we’ve been puzzled by a mysterious word lately: “Röstigraben”
There are several letters for Geneva including Röstigraben. Apparently it refers to the language border between the four different languages spoken in Switzerland: German, French (Romande), Italian (Ticino) and Romansh, that reminded us of the complexity and beauty of this country, but in this case it was all about love, the most important thing, beyond any language or national identity, because it’s universal.
Unfortunately the weather wasn’t clear enough to examine the highest point of Europe, Mount Blanc, but instead we had a meeting with two nice Norwegian scientists from the largest particle physics laboratory in the world CERN after the show, interesting ideas and secret information, hopefully this will articulate into something that we can share with you guys…
Hope to see you somewhere out there!
Efterklang
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