The bold Hamburgian Piano virtuoso who is anti-NFT and All Melody. New post time!

Good Morning to you – I’m Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for me to get typing up on the blog for your track of the day, as per usual, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! A German composer who has gained wide critical acclaim and sizable global success since the mid-2010’s, Nils Frahm is known for combining sensibilities of electronic music and ambient Jazz with his distinct slice of self-composed Contemporary Classical music. His elaborate set-up kit of a grand piano, an upright piano, Roland Juno-60, Rhodes piano, drum machines and a Moog Taurus synth are the tools at his disposal to help him convey emotions and thoughts through his brand of mostly improvised work. He’s hugely prolific, with close ties to similarly inventive modern composers like Ólafur Arnalds, Anne Müller and F.S. Blumn, through frequent collaborations. He also performs with Frederic Gmeiner and Sebastien Singwald as Nonkeen. If I had to flip a coin, it would probably land on ‘All Melody’ as being my personal favourite album of his, and I’ve been an avid follower of Frahm’s recordings for the last four or five years. ‘O I End’ turned out to be a teaser single for ‘Graz’, an album which Frahm recorded in 2009 that never saw the light of day until this point. He ‘surprise dropped’ the nine-track recording in appreciation of World Piano Day on March 29, and you can also put your name down to pre-order the vinyl release of ‘Graz’ due on May 21st via Erased Tapes, and it was mixed by Thomas Geiger. Let your anxieties dissipate with ‘O I End’ below.

A fun fact about ‘World Piano Day’ is that actually happens specifically on the 88th day of the year – and that has been determined to represent the 88 total keys on a Piano. In a press statement on the belated release of ‘Graz’, Nils Frahm had an ambiguous comment to make, and all he had to say was this: “Sometimes, when you hear a Piano, you might think it’s a conversation between a man and a woman”, continuing, “At the same time, it can hint at the shapes of the universe, and describe how a black hole looks”, concluding, “You can make sounds that have no relation to anything we can measure”, in his gently philosophical musings. He’s also been in the news lately for his stance against the digital art format of the NFT which is generating a lot of buzz in the business, saying “Some of my heroes like Aphex Twin are selling, sorry, crap for 130,000 bucks… It’s unforgivable to participate in something which is so bleak and so wrong” in his take on the popular digital format, which he seems to feel is much more of a fad, although I still can’t get my head around what the platform even is. In any case, these comments were a reminder to me on what Nils Frahm is all about. What keeps us coming back to his work is the sense that, in the emotive qualities of his practices, he has an artistic gift of composing music that gives me the feeling of time slowly dissipating, and the more superficial worries of the world becoming much less important through these subtle melodies. It’s a staple from his old bag of tricks that he manages to pull off, once again, on ‘O I End’, a track which sounds contemplative and downbeat. While direct contextual meanings are open to interpretations based on your own feelings and daydreams when you listen to the track, it gives me a feeling of looking back on the fragmented memories of my life. Paired with the rather dark track title of ‘O I End’, it makes me imagine an elderly character reflecting on his life while playing an improvised sequence alone at a piano. The rhythms are deep and soulful, as the washing waves of rolling Piano melodies calmly ease their way from one moment through to the next. The downtempo keys feel isolated, but schooled in a vintage Classical music training that also meets the spontaneity of instrumental Jazz music. It’s gentle, but raw enough to make you feel as though you may be intruding on a more personal experience of the auteur’s soul. It doesn’t really “go anywhere” in the traditional sense, but you could argue that it just doesn’t need to. This is just a well-paced, but soothing and still, moment of reflection.

There’s my musical musing for the day – but please don’t forget to check back with me here tomorrow, for a new entry in our weekly ‘Way Back Wednesdays’ feature where we throw back to the sounds of the past that have influenced the recognizable sounds of the present – or sometimes look back at old rarities that are simply a bit bonkers. The mood strikes me for tomorrow for a flash back to an early recording from a Welsh rock band who are colloquially known as “The Manics” and were a key figurehead of the Welsh Cool Cymru cultural movement in the 1990’s. If you really liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every new daily post is up and why not like the Facebook page here?: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/