Bleep

Nils Frahm, One of the most prolific torchbearers for the poignant contemporary-classical world, took the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit and arrange his archives: an enormous task given the vast number of recordings (usually a full-length release per year) Frahm has put out in the last decade on London-based Erased Tapes Records and now his own imprint with manager Felix Grimm, LEITER.

Reflecting that “often tracks that don’t make it onto an album are the ones with the most boldness and bravery”, the pieces on Old Friends New Friends offer a more intense and emotive foray into the understated melodic world of Frahm’s playing. Where albums such as Graz (2021) or Solo Remains (2016) feel concentrically structured around individual works, the pieces here naturally breathe into one another and the two singles ‘Late’ and ‘All Numbers End’ are both cyclically structured, persuading the listener to live in them not to move through them.

On ‘All Numbers End’, subtle breathing is heard at the close: a sense of the composer himself seeps into the work here, recording techniques capturing each creak of a pedal, each mechanical movement of a key, an embodied document of the human body performing. And the expansive track list itself also helps build up an unfiltered picture of a composer at work over time, a practice in part inspired by the phenomena of the posthumous release or the full catalogue sale: “I hate the idea that somebody might browse through my things trying to find something I’d forgotten. I’ll probably burn everything before I go, but these are pieces I wanted to put out” says Frahm.