On our last night in Istanbul we booked to see Danish Band, Efterklang at a venue called Salon in Beyoğlu, which is over the Golden Horn from the old town and is around the area of the Galata Tower and up to Taksim Square.
Efterklang are from Copenhagen and their name (which sort of means reverberation) takes me right back to my Scandinavian Lit classes at university, where our prof - Hans - aways used to go on about the 'klang' in poetry and I used to have to make an effort to not say out loud that this was a typical, stupid Danish word that nobody could possibly take seriously.
The band is three core members - Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg- joined by other musicians, including for this tour, Tatu Rönkkö (drums), Katinka Fogh Vindelev (piano, vocal) who pretty much stole the show when I saw them. Tatu got down on the floor and played ashtrays for the encore.
We'd heard their music had lots of 'world' influences and that they recorded their most recent album Pyramidia partly at an abandoned Russian mining town in the Arctic circle - (like the start of an indie Ice Station Zebra). They turned out to sound like a pleasant mixture of The National and Wild Beasts, with the addition of Katinka's opera-ish vocal bizarrely reminding me of the scene with the blue singer in The Fifth Element.
They had good banter, collected gifts from the audience to take to their next engagement in Rome (CUTE!) and seemed to have a committed, hardcore fanbase present, despite not having played Istanbul for years.
I will definitely be checking them out on record. I hope what I have heard about their live energy not coming across in recordings isn't true.
My favourite thing about the show was that Efterklang's own super fan, Stuart Brookes, who has been following the tour around Europe, got up on stage to bow out with the band. We noticed Stuart on Twitter when we were in a cafe pre-gig scrounging wifi and it was really fun to see him right there next to the stage having a great time, and then up on stage. I hope they all partied together afterwards.
Here is Stuart's moment:
The venue for our night out was Salon IKSV, a venue a bit like the ICA in London, which hosts exhibitions, gigs, film and fashion events. Be warned - it was pretty hard to find thanks to a very wrong entry on Google Maps that had us running around nearby streets for ages that seemed to contain nothing but lamp shops and fighty-looking stray dogs.
The building was a great modern art/marble encrusted town house mixture that reminded me a lot of Sketch in Soho. They even had a neon birdcage installation that I saw a picture of while I was at the Istanbul Modern.
The concert hall itself is small - 400-capacity- and set out on two tiers. The sound was excellent, even upstairs and it had a really nice intimate feeling. Wherever you were you felt close to the action, even up in the gallery, partly thanks to all the regulars who politely asked to sit on the floor in front of us with their legs dangling through the railings. I apologise to one girl in particular who I kept bonking on the head with my bag while I was dancing.
The funny thing about the gig was that apart from the language you could completely forget where you were, everyone had the International Hipster look you can find in Copenhagen, London, NY, everyone was drinking and there was not a headscarf in sight. I did enjoy the fact that it was on a Saturday, the headlining band started much later (10.45pm) than they would in London and that everything was buzzing in the area afterwards. Weekend gigs really need to become a thing in London.
The concert was a great intro into the more contemporary side of Istanbul that I want to visit again and explore more of in the future... more on that will follow in my full post on Istanbul.
No comments:
Post a Comment