Nils Frahm
22nd November 2019
The Town Hall, Auckland, New Zealand.
Review by Ali Nicholls. Photography by Connor Crawford.
After two years of back to back touring, it is almost expected for a musician to have fine-tuned the craft of delivering their show to a live audience; the crowd that filled the Auckland Town Hall to near-capacity last night certainly anticipating something powerful from German composer Nils Frahm. His discography has received such high praise internationally that Frahm was going to have to do something truly special to surprise his admirers. But as the audience was soon to experience, live delivery is as much a part of his craftsmanship as his music production, and for two whole hours, Frahm took the crowd on a journey through his sound.
Frahm’s set opens with the first track from his 2018 album All Melody, ‘The Whole Universe Wants to be Touched’; Frahm playing with the ambient sound of a silently packed theatre in mind, using the texture of the instruments as a way to amplify our sense of presence in the Town Hall. He follows with ‘Sunson’, at which point we experience our first glimpse into Frahm’s competency as a live digital engineer. Slowly allowing the acoustic sounds of the opening song to bleed into the next with the throbbing heart of the bass synth keeping the momentum going, we are almost unknowingly moved from the tender humanism of the acoustics to the transcendent posthuman digital synthesisers. Frahm manipulates both spaces uniquely, but his skill in weaving the two together is dazzling.
‘My Friend the Forest’ shows us the fragility of his sound. He is withholding, sensitive, and plays through the track with a heart-breaking softness that keeps the audience still, silent, and captivated. Frahm transitions into ‘The Dane’ and ‘Familiar’, which gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his phenomenal skill as a pianist. Moving into ‘Human Range’, he is whipping the keys of his standing piano as though he is spinning decks. His elbows are angled high so that he can maximise his dexterity on the keys while he is fluidly moving between instruments, all the while maintaining a consistent beat from the hammering of the keys.
‘Forever Changeless’ flows into ‘All Melody’, and Frahm begins to guide our affections away from the ambience of the theatre and into the disembodied, dissociated trance of his electronic repertoire. It is also at this moment that the use of light becomes most apparent in his set. Backed by a row of lamps that envelop the stairs of the theatre stage, both Nils Frahm and the gorgeous open backdrop of the Auckland Town Hall are illuminated in synchronisation with the music. ‘#2’ is the final song of the main set. By this point, I wonder whether we have drifted too far away from our grounding here; Frahm’s sound forms a trance, and it verges on overwhelming by the time the final digital track comes to a close. But Frahm is an expert in exploration, and his precisely designed set returns to the present with ‘Hammers’: a phenomenally technical track that tests his dexterity, his consistency, and his ability to lean into the chaos of emotion. It is an invigorating track to place at the end of a set that has been both emotionally taxing and psychospiritually awakening.
Like the marriage of digital and acoustic sound, through his live performance Frahm amplifies the relationship between the emotional and the technical. The instruments that Frahm appears with on stage are various in design, age, and condition. As he weaves between songs, Frahm occupies the stage like a dancer. His gestures are fundamental to the sound he produces, with each movement appearing almost to pull the sounds out from the keys of his instruments. Taking gentle, swooping steps between his two instrumental formations on stage, Frahm seamlessly oscillates between acoustic and electric. All absolutes and finites are replaced with tangible anticipation, the embodied motion of his music, and a total dissolution of the boundaries between human and inhuman techniques of sound.
The show closes with two stunning encore tracks: ‘Says’ and ‘For – Peter – Toilet Brushes – More’. Across these two songs Frahm plays out our journey in short form, serving each moment, each feeling, each detail again. He employs the curves and pockets of the wooden body of an open-top grand piano as individual echo chambers, hammering at the exposed strings and thus generating an extraordinary range of sounds from the same technique. As the song crescendos with Frahm beating the daylights out of the keys, the pulsing hum of overtones swirl round the hall and create a resonance that moves him beyond the stage and into the spaces between and around us. Suddenly the song is at its close, as too is the show, and with the final resounding plink of a lone piano key, Frahm’s arm gestures up to the ceiling and falls, folding him into the bow of a man whose entire body has been exhausted by the sheer physicality of such an embodied performance.
Frahm’s live show amplifies his captivating repertoire. The Town Hall was the perfect venue in which to demonstrate his talent as a performer and his range of skills as a musician. The international praise that Frahm has received for his music is well deserved, but it is in the live delivery that we were able to see the full extent to which Frahm deserves to be recognised as a craftsman, an engineer, a dancer, an artist, a scientist, and a musician. In a 2013 interview with Tristan bath of The Quietus, Frahm explains that “the only thing we can try is changing people’s attitude, but not with words… All the answers you need to know you have inside yourself and all you can do is inspire these sorts of answers, perhaps by conversation or by music or by looking at a piece of art.” This was an enchanting and boundary-pushing performance that engendered Frahm’s perspective in an astonishing and unforgettable two hours.
Were you there at The Auckland Town Hall for this brilliant contemporary classical gig? Or have you seen Nils Frahm perform live somewhere else before? Tell us about it in the comments below!
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