“I felt I could try to touch the stars.”
Nils Frahm speaks to David Sheppard.
Before this album, you’d worked successfully in the same Berlin apartment studio for a decade. What prompted the upgrade? “I’ve always tried to use whatever the immediate recording environment is in the best way possible. I moved to Berlin 12 years ago, and I’ve made so many different things in my little studio. I find too many flaws in my records to really enjoy the music, but I do like the attitude I had in making them. But now that room feels a little empty of inspiration. When I first came to Berlin I heard stories about the Funkhaus and its history. I was always fascinated by it and dreamt of having a studio there. Gradually I got to work there a little bit, either as an engineer or musician, and then I went there for 10 days to record the soundtrack to [Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 movie] Victoria. The place was immediately wonderful. When you have a good-sounding room, everything you play feels so glorious, so important! Even playing a simple A minor chord on the piano, you’re, like, Wow!”
How did the new studio facilitate your vision for this album? “The music is definitely inspired by having 200 square metres of space to work in; I had several musicians working alongside one another, which was impossible in my apartment studio. One of the reasons I wanted to make a bigger, more ambitious album was that I knew I could finally attach some of my dreams to it. What I once did with a drum machine I could now do with a percussion player; what I did with a mellotron pad I could now do with a real choir, and so on. I felt I could try to touch the stars.”
You’ve recorded solo for so long, was it liberating to involve so many collaborators? “I didn’t actually set out to make a band record; I really just wanted to get more specific about the exact timbre of the musical elements. Funnily enough, I ended up surrounded by human beings who offered something of their souls, which I think you can hear on the record. It’s automatically very different from my previous albums. It’s still me, but with an army of my friends.”
The album is stylistically broad and not easily categorised. Are those qualities that you deliberately strive for? “I don’t ever set out to make genre-free music – I wouldn’t mind making a really great, pure jazz record, for example – but I was always inspired by genrebending musicians like Arvo Pärt, Miles Davis or Nina Simone, people who have their own sound and wear musical styles as easily as bathrobes. These were the musicians who blew my mind when I was very young. I always thought the most desirable place to be in music is somewhere you can use all the genres you want to, and have people respect you for it. I think I achieved that on this record, and this is what I’m so happy about.”