From Scratch
MODERN COMPOSITION
Nils Frahm
All Melody
One hand on a grand piano, another on a Juno-60, Nils Frahm consistently challenges the expectations surrounding form and content. Frahm spent the past two years deconstructing and building up a studio space in East Berlin’s historic Funkhaus recording complex from scratch, custom-tuned to the sprawling vision he built around the sketches he’s had in his live repertoire for “All Melody” and “#2” since 2014. Unlike previous releases that documented Frahm reckoning with acoustic parameters set by others in real time, here Frahm is intimately acquainted with the acoustic idiotypes he’s interacting with.
A studio album in the truest sense, All Melody is Frahm at his most comfortable and liberated, rife with the kind of experimentation we can expect from him — acoustic instruments imitating electronic ones, and vice versa — taken to an ambitious new level. While Frahm previously only leaned on his MIDI-controlled pipe organ for long, droning notes, here, he’s tapped into its percussive qualities and rigged it into a drum machine, programming an actual drum machine to sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes, both used to uniquely propulsive effect on tracks like “Sunson” and “A Place.” Elsewhere, he’s brought in trumpets and cello, and in collaboration with Kieran Brunt and the Barbican’s Chris Sharp, he’s even incorporated choral vocals that greet the listener. Hints of Reichian minimalist
into hip-hop with “Citizen Kane (Rap Version),” featuring Mozez and Winnipeg rapper Allan Kingdom, it’s still as cheerful as can be. “Tenor Fly” marks the only sombre note; it’s named after a British MC who passed away in 2016, so the eerie keys and scattered percussion are par for the course. Instrumental tracks “On It Maestro,” “The Other Ship” and “Gotta Smile” all have that smooth fusion of reggae, jazz, trip-hop and world music that NoW are known for. Granted, they’ve jettisoned a lot of the subsonic grittiness found on classics like In a Space Outta Sound, but that’s made up for in the form of slick orchestration. What was once something to blast on your bedroom speakers is now crying out for a live performance with a
Tell me about this studio you’ve rebuilt.
It was basically new electricity, new cables for audio, and then we had to build the whole digital system, which is a big sound cart with 48 channels in and 48 channels out, storage, data handling. The installation of the normal studio was expected, but I had to make new floors, I oiled all the interior wood because it’s mostly wood from the interior, and there was all kinds of stuff that needed to be cleaned and replaced.
You’ve always taken a hands-on approach. Where does that impulse come from?
nine-piece band. ( Warp, warp.net) POP instrumentation, dub electronics, and the influence of Vangelis’s Blade Runner theme can be heard throughout, while fans of the patient, imaginatively recorded acoustic piano treatments Frahm offered on Felt and Screws will be pleased, too. It’s an impressive compilation of provocatively disparate ideas, but taken in its intended order, there’s a mesmerizing continuity to it all. (Erased Tapes, www.erasedtapes.com) I just like building things with my hands. My whole obsession with real instruments is also that I can open them and use mechanical techniques to change the sound. I don’t really know computers very well. I can’t program — I can’t talk to a computer, but when you give me an instrument, I can get a screwdriver. I loved MacGyver when I was a kid. For me, it’s just liberating.