For a contemporary classical musician, Nils Frahm loves to live in the moment. His best work up until now has always melded Keith Jarret-style piano improvisation with the ambient soundscapes of Ólafur Arnalds and A Winged Victory for the Sullen. On his latest record, All Melody, his composition style has gotten more textured and nuanced, while retaining the playful, improvisational qualities of his past work, and it shows an artist operating at a new level of confidence.
Frahm’s style is repetitive yet captivating, and can often be deceptively simple. Can you play a B on a piano over and over? That’s the first minute and 10 seconds of “Said and Done,” a standout from his 2013 record Spaces. The synth vamp on “Says,” another Spaces stunner, sits on the same chord for over five minutes, before morphing into its propulsive, piano-driven climax. He’ll discover new ideas as he performs, get lost in them, and the beauty is in watching these ideas grow.
On All Melody, what’s probably most striking is Frahm’s embracing of electronic elements. One of Frahm’s strengths as a performer has always been his seamless melding of acoustic and electronic instruments, and he shows that in several different ways across the record. “#2” goes on for nearly 10 minutes, first over a spare electronic drum pattern before a wall of synth arpeggios slowly takes over. Elsewhere, “Human Range” pairs an electronic backdrop with a warbling trumpet line. With the trumpet melody, his open-minded composition style strikes again. It sounds as though he picked someone with no knowledge of the instrument, made them record several takes over the track, and then selected the weakest one. It sounds rough and unpolished, but perhaps, that’s what makes it most compelling.
Elsewhere, the title track recalls the electronic via jazz stylings of Floating Points, and tracks like “A Place” recall his collaborations with Arnalds, melding contemporary classical and ambient elements. It just serves as yet another reminder that contemporary classical means you’re drawing from Terry Riley and Philip Glass instead of Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven. But he then segues into “My Friend The Forest,” which is more reminiscent of his solo piano work, and here he shows that he still wants to have it both ways.
Perhaps the most engaging aspect of his work is his willingness to flaunt genre conventions in search of new sonic territory. All Melody is yet another example in his catalogue of his ability to create bewitching soundscapes from different odds and ends. It’s a tactic that results in few misses across the record, as each track is compelling in its own unique way. The tentativeness heard on past records is for the most part gone. Here, Frahm is in command of his own compositional style, and the results are captivating.
