Broadcasting was prestige and propaganda. Since the early 1950s, the GDR had the empty halls of a plywood factory in East Berlin’s Nalepastraße converted and expanded into a radio station, including representative real-socialist architecture. In the meantime, however, the rooms are used privately. Nils Frahm, for example, was able to rent one of the old studios, renovated it, had the world’s largest grand piano, four and a half meters long, built vertically on the wall and experiments with his sound realm full of keyboards, control panels and sound generators as often as he can.
“I like listening to John Cage, Nancarrow, Ligeti, the fifties,” says the Berlin-based composer, pianist and electronic engineer from Hamburg about his inspiration. “Fluxus is a point of reference for me, I don’t even know if I could live on this music planet without Fluxus. Maybe there is also the desire to be part of a line of development that puts the music in the foreground. It’s not about that Faces, names and in general a lot is unclear. Is it music for those who play it or for those who hear it?”
We are familiar with such questions in contemporary classical music, where compositions are sometimes made for autonomously acting niches that are largely decoupled from the main stream of musical interest. But that’s rare in pop. Market interests and exploitation categories dominate there, also with a long tradition.
“One hears pieces mostly in baroque form, as nicely decorated architecture,” muses Frahm, referring to everyday acoustic events. “A lot of things are aimed directly at the listener, trying to serve them like in a good restaurant. And I thought, where are the pieces that work past that? I imagine music like trees that stand in the forest. It doesn’t matter, whether people are interested, the tree exists. It is there. How I then perceive it is initially independent of it”.
However, Nils Frahm is not as completely detached from everything as it sounds. He is even very successful with his ideas for songs that are not constrained by the charts. Frahm produces soundtracks, works with like-minded people like Ólafur Arnalds or Woodkid, tours a lot and regularly works on new projects.
The songs on his current album “Music For Animals”, the most daring experiment to date, are often 20 minutes long, atypical for pop, with atmospheres permeated by fine electronic pulses. This is tedious for the streaming playlist algorithms, but open to ideas while listening. Nils Frahm will present the program in the Isarphilharmonie HP8 on Sunday. Could be an irritating, free-floating evening.
Nils Frahm, Sun., Oct. 2, 8 p.m., Isarphilharmonie, Hans-Preißinger-Straße 8, Tel. 21 83 73 00