Efterklang — Piramida

In August 2011 Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg travelled to Pyramiden, an abandoned Soviet mining settlement on Spitsbergen roughly a thousand kilometres from the North Pole. The town was emptied in 1998 and left largely as it stood.

Over nine days they recorded more than a thousand sounds: oil drums, rusted pipework, a glass bottle dropped down a stairwell, wind moving through empty dormitories, and the town's derelict grand piano. Nothing was brought in as a conventional instrument. The library of field recordings became the rhythmic and harmonic bed of the album.

Back in Berlin and Copenhagen those sources were built into songs — Efterklang's first album as a trio — with guest performances layered over them. It is a pop record made almost entirely from the corpse of a city.