The Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm's Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. It's a mesmerizing and beautiful work.
Spaces by Nils Frahm, released 18 November 2013 1. An Aborted Beginning 2. Said and Done 4. Went Missing 5. Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone 7. For – Peter – Toilet Brushes – More 9. Over There, It's Raining 10. Unter – Tristana – Ambre 11. Ross's Harmonium 'Spaces' is an ode to the joy of live performance. Nils Frahm: Spaces HC. While rummaging through a crate of eclectic and rare pieces, I bump elbows with a scruffy young man, with a peculiarly familiar scent of rolled tobacco. Classical imprint Erased Tapes bring core artist Nils Frahm back into the fold with the new full length ‘Spaces’. The record is largely comprised of the solo piano meditations upon which Frahm has built his reputation, which draw upon the American Minimalism of Philip Glass in their pure, soundtrack-like quality. Born in Berlin in 1982, Nils Frahm was always surrounded by music. His parents were self-taught musicians, while his father, photographer Klaus Frahm, also designed covers for ECM Records, whose churchly jazz atmospheres, along with a wealth of classical music, filled the mind of the young Nils. Nils Frahm - Spaces (December '15 ROTM) Discussion in '. Although fairly different, Felt is another great album. I think I like Spaces more. And I just love the packaging on it. Wokeupnew, teee and Clay Conder like this. Mar 25, 2016 #234. Mahgeetah Well-Known Member. Messages: 1,454 Likes: 3,988. It’s a rare musician that can break through the demographic, amassing both compositional purists and the experimentally curious. Yet German composer Nils Frahm has done just that, crossing from the melancholy of profound piano stories to rhythmically heavy impressions of keys, drum machines and bass.
Featured Tracks:
Tight restrictions are a fundamental component of the music made by Berlin-based composer Nils Frahm. When he plays piano it sometimes feels like his hands are pulling rigid machine-based structures into a lighter, airier place. Frahm is a musician clearly enamored with benchmark figures from the minimalist tradition (Steve Reich, Philip Glass), artists who cross the jazz and classical worlds (Keith Jarrett), film composers that lean toward the tropes of early music (Michael Nyman), and electronic musicians with the lightest of touches (Thomas Fehlmann). Spaces is a live album patchworked together from various recordings, containing songs both old and new, some shortened, some lengthened, some radically different in approach. Some even stay just as they were.
This is an absorbing work, full of pensive moments cut together by music that thrives on dovetailing melodies that can be simultaneously mesmerizing and beautiful. 'Said and Done' is the most impressive of these, with a hammering piano motif looping for most of its 10-minute duration as Frahm filters it through textures both light and dark. It's giddy at times, the sound of a creator utterly lost to his work. The occasional burst of applause or audience noise is a startling reminder that these aren't studio works, although it's easy to forget that fact, so meticulous are the arrangements. Moments of humor work as a neat buffer throughout, stopping everything from becoming too internalized—the Jarrett-referencing 'Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone' is a piece bent around the interruptions suggested in its title.
What's fascinating about Frahm's work here is how he plays with time, working strictly within its limits through tiny repeating motifs, but blowing the overall picture up over such a wide canvas that it's easy to forget how long it's taken to get to where he’s going. The almost 17-minute long medley 'For - Peter - Toilet Brushes - More' is an example of that idea. Plates of coiling synth sound indebted to the new age markers set down by Jean Michel Jarre open up the track, before Frahm glides through bursts of rim-shot percussion, arpeggiated synths, and a return to the strident piano of 'Said and Done'. All the component parts work in miniature, based around fragments of sound and ideas that gradually merge into one despite their wildly different roots. The huge burst of applause at the end is deserved, to say the least.
Spaces Nils Frahm Rares
Something that emerges over time spent with Spaces is a subtly shifting dynamic triggered by the way these tracks are recorded. 'Over There, It's Raining' ostensibly plays out as a pretty low-key piece of neo-romantic yearning. But a large part of its feeling is derived from the tape hiss that muffles at its corners, giving the sentiment a lack of crispness, lending a sense of love and hope gone stale. Even the most forward-thinking track here, the stunning crisscrossing circuitry of 'Says', is far from what it seems at first glance. In a recent interview, Frahm outlines it as an example of 'what can you do with one delay and an old synthesizer, no computers.' It's hard to picture that basic working method when lost in its complex tangle of glossy electronics, underpinned by myriad counter-melodies that stretch out to unfathomable depths.
Nils Frahm Re
For someone as technically accomplished as Frahm surely is, and with so many unique and divisive ideas in mind, Spaces never succumbs to being a set of exercises set to tape. Part of the beauty is in trying to figure out what he's doing and not quite getting there, but mostly it's easy to forget about the way his music is put together and just lose yourself in it instead. Often the charm is, as the title suggests, in the spaces Frahm so artfully leaves between notes. That's an impressive achievement for any live recording—a place where the sweat and sawdust of real life often impinges a little too heavily on otherworldly material, where a layer of fantasy is often shorn away in a manner that can be crude and disillusioning. On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound.