INTERVIEW: Liima (Efterklang + Tatu Ronkko) ‘Electronic Danceable Adult Orientated Rock Music’
Recently signed to London based record label 4AD and in the middle of their first tour in support of their debut album (that we reviewed and loved), we sat down with the musical project Liima to talk to them about writing an album, math rock sensibilities, sound foraging and ‘Electronic Danceable Adult Orientated Rock Music’. Liima is Danish band Efterklang + Finish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö - we had the pleasure of speaking both with Tatu and synth/multi-instrumentalist, Mads.
TMRB: Tatu, we heard you were ill at the beginning of the tour are you fully recovered?
Tatu: I’m not fully recovered but yeah, on the better side, yeah. Mads: It was funny we were really trying to come up with a way to play some songs without him, because last week, in Belgium, we were performing this opera, Leaves, that Efterklang did in the summer. It was supposed to be this double thing, where the opera was sort of one atmosphere, and then Liima would be very nice after that. We were really trying to come up with ideas because we were like ‘its not gonna be….we can’t’ Tatu: Got a hole without our drum machine. Mads: We were even considering getting the midi from the studio, and then filling it in.
TMRB: So we’re from the Math Rock Blog, we wondered if you’ve heard of the genre or the description of ‘mathy music’ before and what you know about it.
Tatu: I don’t know if I’ve heard any descriptions, or of what it actually covers, in my mind its sort of like...that’s why I mentioned Meshuggah before, like a metal band that has a lot of polyrhythms and time signature things and complex stuff, having to do with numbers and counting in a way.
TMRB: That raises the second question about the song Black Beach; I tried to count the time signature, I counted a bar of 6 at the start and after that I got very lost.
Tatu: It’s 15/16, but there’s also like a sequence of 3 on top of that which and 15 is dividable by 3, so it sounds more even that it actually is, in a way.
TMRB: You’ve previously spoken about, what I think Casper called “Sound foraging” as a starting point, how does this approach influence the music you go onto create?
Mads: I think it’s like, about foraging, when you’re using samplers you might as well record your own samples - thereby creating your own sounds - instead of downloading them from the internet or whatever. It was sort of the core of the idea - the first time we met to make music together - to try and record some samples because we were going to the Finnish woods and there are so many funny sounds that you don’t have in the studio. But when you go to a cottage in the woods there’s like all kinds of tools and this nature that you can use.
TMRB: I know you did that for Efterklang, you recorded natural sounds to begin with, so you did a similar thing at the start with Liima?
Mads: Yeah, yeah sort of like a starting point, it’s nice to get some sounds, with Liima it’s more spontaneous, it’s a bit more elaborate, we just want to get going fast, so it’s not like we spent three days sampling.
Tatu: Yeah it’s really intuitive and impulsive, like sometimes it’s like “this is a cool sound, let’s take it.” It also becomes a good memory for the location where we created the music, like Finland or Madeira, or just recently we were in Copenhagen in a hotel and I just sampled a toilet and made a drum kit of the toilet sounds. It’s not that that’s the point, but after time passes it reminds you of the place where we were.
Mads: It’s sort of nicer when you don’t know what it is, because I think it sounds really nice but then it’s like, when you know what it is it’s almost comical. It was like this metallic really nice thing. But you’re always balancing on, do you need to know what it is or is it just the sound? I mean in the end it is just a sound that sounds like a field recording or home made thing.
TMRB: Are you consciously creating those time signatures or does that come from being spontaneous, do you just end up at 15/16, or is that constructed?
Mads: I think sometimes its nice to challenge yourself to play different keys, different time signatures, and try and see if you can do something that is different, but without it being unnatural. We kind of feel something going…get like a groove going that is something mathy, but you can also just listen to it, and enjoy it, without having to be like “woaah”, you know?
Tatu: It’s a bit the same with this sampling thing. The point is that you’re like “hey this is the sample from the toilet” or that you reach the point where you’re like “hey this is a fucking complex 15/16 time signature.” It’s something that challenges you, but still is danceable. It’s kind of a frame for ourselves, both the sampling and creating rhythmically complex things.
TMRB: You’ve mentioned that you’ve been in lots of different places doing this sampling having had residencies in 4 different countries, were there any specific places where it shifted direction, or where a song just solidified in one of those residences?
Mads: Now it’s actually 6 residencies, including London and Copenhagen. Actually how we work is that we create a song in a day, so that we can sort of remember where the song was born - it has to be 90% there in one day. Of course, we go back and make some adjustments and go over structure, but its always instant, we come up with an idea and we finish that in one day and then we go on and on and on...then we have a concert at the end of the residency. We maybe create between 4 or 6 songs in one week and then play them live, together with what we have from the past.
TMRB: So they’re born in just one day and evolve until you perform them?
Tatu: Yeah, so it’s very much related to that moment and one place.
Mads: And they each have their own sort of nature and mood and like how we’re feeling, where we are. Because in Finland we were in the cottage in the woods, and then Berlin was in our studio and Istanbul was in this club. Istanbul is so different from Finland, so that all sort of inspires us differently, we bring different toys and different gear and figure out how can we make music using this, so each residency has a different sound.
TMRB: Your creative process seems to be very reflexive, producing your sound in open studios and using new ideas and tools during each residencies. During your two years touring, you seemed voluntarily undefined with songs constantly changing...
Mads: ...yeah but it’s sort of like a funnel, it’s like we start kind of loose and the core ideas of the songs are there, but over time it comes to the point where they’re more defined.
TMRB:...so what was it like to then define those songs into something definitive and clear cut for the album?
Mads: Actually Jonas (Jonas Verwijnen) came into our rehearsal space and helped us sort of focus the songs, because before that, we were sort of playing them with a lot of cues, and sort of a mutual understanding of when to go to the next part. Then we were starting to be aware of like, okay, there must be a length that is good for this part, so we’re not just doing it differently every time.
Tatu: We were refining them on the way, trying different versions, but then just before the recording, Jonas was producing the record, so he came in and gave an objective vision of “okay, maybe this could be good” or “it’s really good how it is, don’t change anything.” So I think the most challenging thing in the end was choosing the songs that end up on the album, coming up with the set list of the album, because we recorded 16 songs, in four days actually, then we mixed everything, and then we just chose the 10 out of 16, so that to me at least was the most sort of like…’fuuuuuck.’
Mads: Because of the processes we could make many different albums, the different combinations of songs would make different albums. We had the LP length that we wanted them to be on, that was about 40 minutes - of course we could have just released everything but we wanted to condense it and make it a 40 minutes experience rather than one hour. So that was fun.
TMRB: Were there any songs that when you wrote them, you knew immediately that they had a place on the album, as the opener or closer. ‘Your Heart’, for instance, has a very unique sound.
Tatu: That was kind of a random opener, it’s a strong song but we never thought ‘okay, this should definitely open the album.’
Mads: I know what you mean, sometimes you do this thing where you have the start and end, you have a frame and then you put the songs into it. But because they were written from four different times, it’s very spontaneous and not really thought out. Everything was up in the air, literally all the songs. Maybe Amerika was the only one that was never suggested to be out. We were just firing playlists at random and some of them were black and white, but, there’s not really right and wrong, because it depends what kind of album you’re making.
TMRB: What was that recording process like, you said you did it in four days?
Tatu: It took a while to set up, we set up like we do live on stage and just do takes - like 3 or 4 takes with some songs - and then just move on and keep it light. It’s about keeping the live atmosphere, everyone was in one room, it was one big room, not separate rooms.
TMRB: From the start, did you decide to formulate something very separate from Efterklang, or was it more a case that you started making music and it just wasn’t the music of Efterklang?
Mads: The latter I think. We wanted to do something with Tatu and have a fresh start and not write Efterklang songs together. We’d already been playing together, Tatu was performing on the last Efterklang tour for 2 years, and then we got the opportunity to go to Finland and do a residency and play at this festival. We thought, ‘great let’s go up there and makes some music.’ It was sort of like, at least for me at the beginning, let’s spend 2 or 3 weeks in the summer and have fun and see what happens.We had some kind of goal as well, because the festival was really a hard deadline, there were 200 people coming to watch you. But then as we approached it, it was fun and good and we were like ‘yeah, let’s do it again and let’s evolve on it’. Then, I think by the second gig in Berlin, we thought it felt good but it was also a different band, it grew into something that was not Efterklang and it shouldn’t be.
TMRB: Do you think it was important for listeners of Efterklang not to listen to the music with any expectations and to see Liima as a new thing entirely?
Mads: Yeah it is a new thing, it’s a different thing, of course we cannot hide who we are and Casper sounds like Casper, but then he also uses different effects and harmonises and his intonation is different and the whole process of making music is so far from what Efterklang used to do. It feels totally different to us.
TMRB: How have your rituals, associated with the whole process of making music, changed since this new regeneration?
Mads: With Liima it’s very different.
Tatu: We’re composing collectively, just being four guys who are now composing things together in a quite spontaneous way, jamming out.
Mads: What we do is that we set up our stuff and then we start playing, just improvising for maybe an hour and then recording it, then immediately listening back to it and then at one point it’s like you’ll start saying like “okay dude this is good” <good riff or melody or> and then something is happening, and then we try and hunt that for the next few hours, this was a good thing to try to recreate that. But nothing is computerised or in the studio, if we want to change something, we play it again differently.
TMRB: There are a couple of slightly unsettling songs on the album in our opinion, Trains in the Dark and Roger Waters is a little bit more eerie, were they influenced by anything in particular or did they just arise out of these jams?
Tatu: We were in Istanbul when we did Roger Waters in this dark club and it was a dark winter, so I could sort of hear the place in Roger Waters, but Trains in The Dark was composed in Finland during the summer, but that song also took much kind of rougher shape much later I would say, the mixing of that songs was really essential for how it sounds on the album version, the bass being really distorted and really kind of framed and in your face. But it’s been always a sort of crowd rocky train going on.
TMRB: Casper has said that you all have a common curiosity for sound, and for searching for sound, which has created this collaboration, where do you think this curiosity is taking you? And from your residencies in London and Copenhagen where do you feel it going?
Tatu: There is one other strong genre word which we were talking about; AOR, Adult Orientated Rock Music, but then we created our own genre word A..O..EAR…something: Electronic Danceable Adult Orientated Rock Music, so its sort of laid back and simplifying certain things, more like this idea of finding one good mood and groove and staying on that and not doing too many proggy changes.
But let’s see! The best thing about this whole thing is that you never know what’s going to happen next, how the next residency will be done, and that’s also the most exciting thing about this thing, we don’t have boundaries in the way that we have to follow some sort of aesthetic path or anything, everything’s all good.
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