(Erased Tapes)
When songs are played
live, they are in a constant state of transition, every note, beat or
timbre is open to change, and over time it likely will, with a
recording only being a starting point in a piece of music's lifespan.
Nils Frahm seems to know this and has allowed his music to grow and
continue to develop long after the albums they first appeared. His
latest album Spaces is a live album, but not in the
traditional sense, pieced together from years of performances but
given the hindsight and care to detail of the recording that comes
with a studio treatment. Spaces has allowed Frahm to capturing
unique moments where everything comes together perfectly like it only
can in a live setting, utilising unique sounds of the different
venues he has played and showing how songs have evolved over time
into something different from their original recordings.
Whilst sharing
similarities with the other composers based around the Erased Tapes
label like Ólafur Arnalds
and A Winged Victory For The Sullen, Frahm has separated himself from
other musicians in part due to his role as a technician or producer
as well as composer but here more than ever, it's his musicianship
laid bare in a hall before the audience. As a result Spaces
lacks some of the sonic subtleties of his last album Felt, in
which the background noise was almost as prominent as the piano, it
is the performance, not the ambience, that is the highlight. It works
because of the keen ear for a good melody that is always on show and
which is what I suspect has made his music so approachable to many,
even those who are unfamiliar with the classical world and comparable
to Eric Satie's instantly recognisable work, who shares his knack for
melody and mood.
Right off the bat
Frahm alludes the mistakes and imperfections that that go hand in
hand with live performances on the opening track An Aborted
Beginning. It seems to fall apart, breaking into pieces over it's
short duration, but still shows of a facet of Frahm that we doesn't
often see as a beat, blanketed in reverb, stomps around synthesizer
flourishes. One of the original pieces on the album, Says, features
synthesizer arpeggios that wrap themselves around soft piano notes.
It lets you sink in amongst the interweaving melodies that feel like
cogs in an old clock working together, where each detail is necessary
to create the whole. The track seems to lull you into its atmosphere
before a chord sequence develops adding new elements until it's
climactic and breathtaking peak.
Said and Done has
become completely different from it's original state, propelled by
its single note backbone, on which the rest of the tune is built, it
grows in to an almost ten minute epic, reaching some unexpected
intensity as you imagine Frahm striking at the keys with a rhythmic
ferocity. On Hammers Frahm displays some impressive high tempo
playing as the piece begins at a much quicker pace than the relaxed
ambience of most of his work and it doesn't relent, making for a
pleasantly chaotic change of pace. Familiar, originally from Felt,
takes on a much fuller sound in the live setting, and lets it strong
melody ring out all the clearer for it.
At over seventy
minutes it feels more like a concert that you've sat through than
just an album. Spaces' greatest weakness is that the album
feels like it only really sticks to one tone. Even though it sees
that tone taken through the whole dynamic range, Frahm rarely breaks
out of his tuneful, melancholic compositions into something either
darker or brighter.
Fans of Frahm's work
can hear reinterpretations and widely developed versions of older
tracks, most of which surpass the originals or just alter them enough
to make them seem fresh and new There are also little snippets of
humour, which is refreshing in the often cold world of classical
music, with song titles like Toilet Brushes and Improvisation for
Coughs and a Cell Phone adding something to the otherwise vague
names, left to interpretation. Spaces still displays the work
of a skilled craftsman who carefully builds his sonic sculptures
layer by layer, and listening to the end product its hard not to be
taken with the impressive work he has created.
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