Familiar Eternities
With Composer
Nils Frahm

It’s not possible for each and every song to be a live song. There are some songs that have a second or third possibility to become a new song, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than other songs that only have one version they can exist in. Maybe a song is linked to a specific sound you cannot replicate live or is something you found while experimenting in the studio.

Maybe it’s a selfish thing and the only process I’m achieving is that I’m happier playing it. But even if that’s the case, even if I’m in the only person in the room wanting a new version of a song, it’s still important that I feel good about it, because what lies beneath each live performance is watching me enjoy my time on stage. Even if someone is watching who is very not a musician, they can get something from the show because they realize, okay this dude is really having fun and whatever he’s doing I wish I could connect with whatever I’m doing like that. I think this is, humbly, maybe my best talent: to fall into my work as I do and have people watch it and become inspired because of it — no matter if I’m playing new music, or if they were to, say, watch me cook pasta. Imagine like, wow, look at him cooking, he’s so into it.

I have that experience with some musicians when I’ve only listened to their music but then it sounded different after I’ve seen them play live.

Recently, it was with Roland Kirk, a jazz saxophone player. Incredible guy with incredible energy. He’s blind, and he plays up to three saxophones at the same time. Just imagine the physical control and power of that man. He’s an improviser and I really like his humor; he blows into crazy whistles and basically plays every toy that makes a sound. But when he plays three saxophones at once, it sounds like a choir of brass instruments. It sounds harmless when you don’t know what’s happening visually, but once you see it, it’s the most captivating thing you’ve ever seen.

I’ve always been driven by wanting to have my own sound. But on the other hand, I’ve always been really affected by pieces of art which feel timeless, where somebody’s datedness or ego completely dissolves, and you don’t know if it’s from now or the future or a thousand years ago. I like that alienated familiarity, and I try to create that in my music. It’s almost like if you were to look into a black hole on the far side of the galaxy for a close friend and then you find that friend there. Maybe it’s something that can only happen in music, to find the void of eternity and complete infinity in sounds—distant universes and galaxies that I want to explore, but to do so while holding the warm hand of somebody I know.

I’ll always say that musical inspiration comes from people like Steve Reich or Brian Eno or Kraftwerk, visionaries who had a new sound and made that sound become their personal thing. In jazz there were so many great musicians who had their distinct sound, like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk on the piano or John Coltrane on the saxophone. I mean, John Coltrane...he speaks through the instrument. More recently, Arvo Pärt, a composer who writes timeless music which seems to be from somewhere else. A recommendation for everyone is Valentin Silvestrov, an underrated Ukrainian composer who writes the type of music I dream about writing.

My favorite acoustic environments are where I don’t hear manmade sounds. In mountains where you have echoes coming from all different sides and maybe you just hear a bird hitting its wings together. The more complex the reverb is, the more excited I am. Some of the most beautiful sounds come from water in all forms. Motors are very boring, they’re like synthesizers that play no melody and it’s not so exciting. But I really like natural acoustics, and that tunes my hearing in the end because, when I’m in a city like Berlin and I’m listening to music for months and months and months every day, I often need one or two months without making music or listening to music.

Back in the day I was a night person, but now I’m getting very tired at night, which is maybe healthy. The beautiful thing is that I have so much on my plate that I can put what I have to do in different time slots. Everything that’s technical and bureaucratic, I’m doing that right after I take a shower. In the haze of the morning waking up, all these things happen naturally. The more late it gets in the day, the more emotional I become about everything. Like when I make music in the morning, maybe I’m more conceptual about it, and when I play after dinner, then I’m playing more emotionally.

I’ve had some beautiful moments recently when we were in lockdown. I was playing music in my studio and my wife came to visit me for a change of scenery and she started playing the glass organ. I was playing too, and it sounded very beautiful. It’s always context, you know. It's almost horrible to describe the process because people would be like, Jesus Christ, relax and be happy. But this job is definitely not about being satisfied, it's about navigating away from getting completely annoyed by what you're hearing. I describe finding fulfillment in a song as if I don't feel like there's anything bugging me. Then I can be like, okay I don't have anything more to say or complain about, and the process is finished. That sounds quite negative, but it's what I enjoy doing. I like to find the problem. I'm a detective in that way.