Deep listening

Berlin-based keyboardist forsakes solitude for multiple personnel, reinvention and reverb from the bottom of a well.

Nils Frahm All Melody

The 88-key acoustic piano has been kind to Nils Frahm. It’s the principal instrument with which the 35-year-old has essayed his six, ever more commercially impactful albums of intimate, non-rock instrumentals. Partly in acknowledgment, in 2015 he launched the annual Piano Day celebration, which falls, naturally enough, on the 88th day of the year, helping confirm his status as poster boy for a slippery musical genre whose various appellations – post-classical, neo-classical et al – are largely erroneous for music, whether purveyed by Frahm or by fellow pianistic travellers like Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter or Hauschka, that owes as much to the canons of ambient electronica and minimalism as to the conservatoire. A one-time jobbing recording engineer whose albums have generally been captured literally solo in his Berlin apartment studio, Frahm’s roots actually lie equally in a classical training, childhood immersion in his father’s ECM jazz albums, and teeth-cutting years in the techno clubs of his native Hamburg. Indeed, an Arthur Russelllike ability to oscillate between acoustic and electronic configurations has latterly become a hallmark. Tellingly, his best-known track, Says, from 2013 multi-locationrecorded album Spaces, is a dynamically arpeggiating synthesizer piece closer to Vangelis than Erik Satie. Even as a pianist, Frahm is an innovator. His trademark gossamer sound, established on breakthrough 2011 album Felt, was arrived at by swaddling piano hammers in the titular fabric, ostensibly to enable afterhours recording, while 2012’s Screws was improvised on nine digits, after Frahm broke a thumb. He’s been expanding his keyboard vocabulary since 2011’s Juno EP, devoted to the eponymous synthesizer, as well as exploring anachronistic pianos like the colossal M370 upright with which he delivered 2015’s Solo, or, live, summoning tones by caressing the strings of an amplified concert grand with a pair of IKEA toilet brushes. So potent has been Frahm’s main signature – surgicallyrecorded piano mechanics wedded to a poignant melodic aesthetic – that a mimetic sub-genre has developed, with artists such as Dead Light and Halo proffering similarly lyrical sketches on muted, prepared or even broken pianos. So no wonder the sometimes lavish, occasionally abstruse and often entirely piano-free All Melody feels like a thrown-down gauntlet. Two years in the making, it finds Frahm painting from a rainbow palette, its capacious arrangements and forensically detailed production facilitated by Saal 3, his new, bespoke studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the sprawling, former broadcast headquarters of East German state radio. In his notes, Frahm explains how the set-up enabled an almost holistic approach to recording. All Melody certainly offers a synthesis of choice timbres, teased from Frahm’s analogue and modular synths, mellotron, harmonium and celeste, as well as beat box and organ, plus further augmentation from trumpeter Richard Koch, string players Viktor Orri Árnason and Anne Müller, percussionist Tatu Rönkkö and the 12-piece Shards Choir. The sound of footsteps tripping, seemingly excitedly, across the studio floor, opens proceedings, ushering in the rasping harmonium and choral female descants of startling tone-setter The Whole Universe Wants To Be Touched. No sooner established, its numinous vocal layers swiftly dissolve, exposing a dirge-like coda that might’ve fallen off Nico’s Desertshore. That plagal drone is picked up by Sunson, which yields to pulsing electronics, heartbeat percussion and tootling, panpipe-like organ, all filtered through lurching crosscurrents of dub echo – this counter-intuitive rhythmic mesh finally offset by soothing, Arcadian synth lines. A Place unfurls further terra incognita, its tremulous synths smeared with viola and more of the choir’s imperious ululations bathed in opulent reverb, courtesy of a resonant Mallorcan well (see Back Story). Gauzy piano extemporisations finally get a look in on the succeeding My Friend The Forest. Pitched between Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert and the vanilla daubs of new age pianist George Winston, it’s one of the few pieces here that would’ve sat comfortably on an earlier Frahm album. Striking ingenuity returns on Human Range, with Richard Koch’s horn carving melancholy, Jon Hassell-ish arcs across a hazy winter-scape of processed tympani and Frahm’s ominous, liminal electronics. Gradually, the inchoate forms condense into a funereal procession, impelled forward by deep bass marimbas and ornamented with pizzicato strings and plangent choral harmony. Gears change again with the throbbing Tangerine Dream-like title track, and while this and the ensuing, similarly synth-propelled #2 threaten to overstay their trance-indebted welcome (and might have been better sequenced apart), textural relief arrives in the shape of Momentum’s hymnal choir meditations, while the initially menacing, John Carpenter-esque synth flurries of Kaleidoscope soon surrender to an onrush of flutey pipe organ arpeggios, joining the dots between Dolly Collins and Philip Glass’s Music In Twelve Parts. Harm Hymn, a brief, churchy étude for Frahm’s harmonium, wraps things up; save for 30 seconds of Funkhaus hum tone, the studio decompressing after all that parameter stretching. Ultimately, All Melody feels like a slight misnomer for such an ambitious and unclassifiable album. While undoubtedly boasting its share of earworm tunes, it’s as much a showcase for the sheer plasticity of recorded sound as a vehicle for mellifluous expression. It will be fascinating to hear what the now untrammelled composer conjures up next time he goes to the well.

“VOCAL LAYERS SWIFTLY DISSOLVE, EXPOSING A DIRGE-LIKE CODA THAT MIGHT’VE FALLEN OFF NICO’S DESERTSHORE .”