In The Studio With | Nils Frahm
As the German composer and producer returns with a new three-hour opus, he tells Matt Mullen how his gear choices have shaped his genre-hopping sound
Many artists shun modern, digital equipment in favour of analogue instruments: it’s a story that’s been told through countless interviews, in these pages and elsewhere. But none we’ve spoken to seem to have pondered this preference quite as deeply as Nils Frahm. The German composer/producer’s fondness for the analogue springs not from gear fetishism or the fusty nostalgia of a chin-stroking purist, but a deep-seated reverence for the sound’s power to evoke something extramusical – something spiritual.
“My constant inspiration,” Frahm says of the creative process behind his new album, Music For Animals, “was something as mesmerising as watching a great waterfall, or the leaves on a tree in a storm.” Meditative moments like these led him to draw parallels between the nature of his experience, the music he was working on and the instruments used to create it. “I wanted to imagine music which works in similar ways,” he tells us. “Sitting at this waterfall, watching the water go, it reminded me of my synthesiser playing an arpeggio. The notes go into my effects unit, and even though it feels like a loop, when you focus on it, it sounds different every round. That’s why I love analogue.”
In the tendency of analogue machines to exhibit minute variations in their sound and behaviour, Frahm found something authentic, a sense of imperfection and a constant flux that mirrors something fundamental about the world. “When you sample something digitally with a PCM sound, you sample the same bits, the same exact information,” Frahm says. “But when it actually sounds the same then I’m dead. It’s dead air, I feel it with my heart.”
This philosophy lies at the core of Frahm’s latest release, Music For Animals. The project was conceived and recorded in Saal 3 of Berlin’s colossal Funkhaus complex, a studio that’s been managed by Frahm since he oversaw an extensive overhaul in 2016. Deconstructed, reconstructed and outfitted with a carefully curated selection of analogue gear, vintage effects units, a custom-built mixing desk and a restored physical reverb chamber, the exquisitely wood-panelled space was first used to record Nils’ previous album, All Melody.
But where that record pushed the studio to its limits, seeing the composer invite a variety of new timbres and textures into his world, his latest represents a move in the opposite direction – from maximalism to minimalism, from All Melody to No Melody. A collection of ten improvised compositions for glass harmonica, pump organ, Mellotron and a hand
