LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED!

There’s hasn’t been much news on this site from our new little band yet, but let’s try to change that. I’ll start off with a little background for the whole project. The Klingra band has grown out of the band Afenginn and become a separate little baby. Afenginn has been going since 2002 and has developed quite a musically from the first albums. In 2019 we released an album called “Klingra” (meaning circle in Faroese), which was a collaboration with a bunch of Faroese musicians. The lyrics were written by Dánjal á Neystabø in Faroese and sung by Ólavur Jákupsson. Dánjal was also involved in the making of the music. Mikael Blak was playing bass and synths and on the other piano we had Teitur playing in his wonderful way. The whole thing was furthermore recorded on the Faroe Islands. The album also features Maggie Björklund on pedal steel guitar and Danish String Quartet on strings.

Apart from having a different line up than the previous Afenginn records, the music had taken quite a leap in a new direction as well. Performing the album live made it clear how different the music and output actually was and it made it increasingly challenging to craft a setlist where old and new music could stand side by side. Musically, logistically and artistically it made much better sense to perform the new Klingra material (together with similar material from the albums Lux and Opus) as one concert, and at other shows focus on the music from Opus and back. So from there the decision to make a new band was pretty straight forward.

Dánjal and myself got together and started working on new music for the new band, which we call Klingra. Since then we’ve written and composed a whole new album, which was performed back to back at our debut show in Torshavn, Faroe Island in December 2020. The Klingra album will also be performed by Klingra band (Afenginn will keep working with a different artistic output with new stuff coming up there as well).

So, that’s where we are at the moment. In a few days the whole group will meet in the Faroe Islands to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, play a single show and then dive into the studio start recording this new music. Personally, I’m really really looking forward to this part of the process. It’s a wonderful group of very talented and creative musicians:

Dánjal á Neystabø: piano, vocals
Kim Rafael Nyberg: piano, keys, vocals
Heðin Ziska Davidsen: guitar, tons of synths, electronics, vocals, etc
Maggie Björklund: pedal steel guitar
Mikael Blak: bass, synth bass, electronics
Knut Finsrud: drums, percussion
Roma Komar: sound design, trumpet, electronics

The album will most likely feature a choir as well as a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Here’s a short snippet from our first show. It’s a part of the track “Sigursljóð”