Nils Frahm has been mixing classical music with experimental and electronic music from the very beginning of his career as a composer.
For his seventh studio album, All Melody, out now on Erased Tapes, the German musician took this a step further, spending two years building his own studio in Berlin in the historical 1950s East German Funkhaus building beside the River Spree. He deconstructed and reconstructed the entire space, from the cables and electricity to the woodwork, before moving on to the finer elements—building a pipe organ and creating a mixing desk, all from scratch, with the help of his friends.
This is how Frahm describes his latest album:
All Melody was imagined to be so many things over time and it has been a whole lot, but never exactly what I planned it to be. I wanted to hear beautiful drums, drums I’ve never seen or heard before, accompanied by human voices, girls, and boys. They would sing a song from this very world and it would sound like it was from a different space. I heard a synthesiser which sounds like a harmonium playing the All Melody, melting together with a line of a harmonium sounding like a synthesiser. My pipe organ would turn into a drum machine, while my drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes. I would turn my piano into my very voice, and any voice into a ringing string. The music I hear inside me will never end up on a record, as it seems I can only play it for myself.
Watch the official album trailer below!
