August (1) 2022 - Nils Frahm – Tripping with Nils Frahm
Jul 31, 2022 23:52:36 GMT
ChrisB, julesd68, and 1 more like this
Post by nicholas on Jul 31, 2022 23:52:36 GMT
December, 2020 – Nils Frahm – Tripping with Nils Frahm
This album came my way following a series of upgrades to my system. I was struck by the sonics of a one man live concert playing incredibly complex yet melodic synths with plenty of hooks. “ Sunson” and “All Melody” were stand out pieces for me.
Pitchfork review:
pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-tripping-with-nils-frahm/
Surrounded by keyboards and machines—grand piano, upright piano, harmonium, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron, toy piano, Roland Juno-60, Moog Taurus, Roland SH 2, analog drum machines, and tape delay units—he is a mad scientist of MIDI/CV converters, a flat-capped conductor of hammers and pan pots and LEDs. Sculpting sine waves into controlled whirlwinds, he straddles his gear, arms akimbo, lunging from station to station: hammering out Rhodes arpeggios with one hand and toggling sequencer parameters with the other, then shifting to the Yamaha grand in the space of a beat, all while finessing his delay chain, triggering pipe-organ samples, and keeping his drum machines in check. There are moments of stillness, too, but at their peaks, his shows are athletic feats as much as they are opportunities to get lost in sound.
Frahm’s showmanship was on full display in December 2018, when he set up at Berlin’s historic Funkhaus—a former East German radio headquarters, where he keeps his own recording studio—for four consecutive nights of performances. He played in the round, a castaway on a small island of gear, by turns manic, melancholy, and mild. Tripping With Nils Frahm, which boils down choice moments from those four nights into a 76-minute album, is more polished than his 2013 live album, Spaces, a compendium of two years of live performances. That collection acknowledged both spontaneity (“Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone”) and the constant possibility of failure (“An Aborted Beginning,” an ambient dub sketch that peters out after 94 seconds), but on the new one, he and his passel of gear are a well-oiled machine.
Spotify link:
YouTube Music link:
music.youtube.com/watch?v=13mqCPzx2Ek&list=OLAK5uy_kD9IIlCQX7zAnOQwXbieNo_QRZeIUnUxI
This album came my way following a series of upgrades to my system. I was struck by the sonics of a one man live concert playing incredibly complex yet melodic synths with plenty of hooks. “ Sunson” and “All Melody” were stand out pieces for me.
Pitchfork review:
pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-tripping-with-nils-frahm/
Surrounded by keyboards and machines—grand piano, upright piano, harmonium, Fender Rhodes, Mellotron, toy piano, Roland Juno-60, Moog Taurus, Roland SH 2, analog drum machines, and tape delay units—he is a mad scientist of MIDI/CV converters, a flat-capped conductor of hammers and pan pots and LEDs. Sculpting sine waves into controlled whirlwinds, he straddles his gear, arms akimbo, lunging from station to station: hammering out Rhodes arpeggios with one hand and toggling sequencer parameters with the other, then shifting to the Yamaha grand in the space of a beat, all while finessing his delay chain, triggering pipe-organ samples, and keeping his drum machines in check. There are moments of stillness, too, but at their peaks, his shows are athletic feats as much as they are opportunities to get lost in sound.
Frahm’s showmanship was on full display in December 2018, when he set up at Berlin’s historic Funkhaus—a former East German radio headquarters, where he keeps his own recording studio—for four consecutive nights of performances. He played in the round, a castaway on a small island of gear, by turns manic, melancholy, and mild. Tripping With Nils Frahm, which boils down choice moments from those four nights into a 76-minute album, is more polished than his 2013 live album, Spaces, a compendium of two years of live performances. That collection acknowledged both spontaneity (“Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone”) and the constant possibility of failure (“An Aborted Beginning,” an ambient dub sketch that peters out after 94 seconds), but on the new one, he and his passel of gear are a well-oiled machine.
Spotify link:
YouTube Music link:
music.youtube.com/watch?v=13mqCPzx2Ek&list=OLAK5uy_kD9IIlCQX7zAnOQwXbieNo_QRZeIUnUxI
