The German pianist Nils Frahm likes to think big. He is the founder of Piano Day, an annual holiday dedicated to the instrument, and for a time he was the owner of the world’s largest upright, a Klavins M450i, standing a mammoth 14 feet, nine inches tall. (Since the release earlier this year of the M470i, eight inches taller, his model has, alas, been relegated to proverbial second fiddle.) Stages sag under the weight of his live rig, which can consist of Yamaha grand piano, Fender Rhodes, vintage Mellotron, three Roland Juno-60 synths, at least three drum machines, five Roland RE-501 Chorus Echoes, and racks upon racks of sundry effects, mixers, amps, and still more keyboards; darting from station to station, Frahm concocts a throbbing sort of chamber techno, a many-layered mixture of electronic pulses and acoustic timbres. Still, on record, his music often tends toward the opposite extreme: a kind of contemplative, cloistered intimacy.
Where last year’s All Melody, Frahm’s most ambitious album statement to date, attempted to bring together those two opposing poles—fashioning choir, strings, horns, gongs, pipe organ, and his usual welter of acoustic and electronic elements into a whole at once vast and hushed—All Encores takes a step backward, toward a simpler, sparer sound. In essence, it represents a set of rough drafts, avenues abandoned as All Melody assumed its final form. All 12 tracks here were originally released on a trilogy of EPs, remnants of a proposed triple album that never came to completion, exploring distinct corners of Frahm’s musical practice.
The first four tracks focus on Frahm’s solo piano, with the addition of a brief trumpet soliloquy that opens the second song, “Ringing,” on a particularly mournful note. This is terrain Frahm has explored, in slightly different form, on 2012’s Screws and 2015’s Solo; the pleasure here is in the virtually unplugged proprieties of the recordings—no bells or whistles, just Frahm’s sentimental melodies swimming in the natural ambiance of the Berlin Funkhaus studios, where he recorded. Like All Melody’s unadorned highlights “My Friend the Forest” and “Forever Changeless,” All Encores’ opener, “The Roughest Trade,” is recorded in a way that emphasizes the piano’s mechanics—the clack of the keys as they rise and fall; the soft shuffle of the striking hammers. It amounts to a kind of X-ray of melody in motion, the piano’s wood-and-metal skeleton illuminated beneath Frahm’s pale balladry. None of the other three piano songs have quite the same emotional pull—their melodies are simpler, or simply more forgettable—though the gently swaying “The Dane,” a staple of his live shows, comes close.
After “Harmonium in the Well,” an 11-minute study for reed organ and natural reverb (presumably, given the title, the one he fashioned out of a stone well in Mallorca), All Encores returns to the hybrid textures of All Melody, albeit in scaled-back form. “Sweet Little Lie” sets a drowsy piano lullaby against whispering static; “A Walking Embrace,” for piano and swelling synth pads, verges on the maudlin, as delicate—and as dated—as a collection of glass animals. Only “Spells” attempts the climatic scale of All Melody’s most elaborate pieces—a welcome shot of adrenaline just when the album is in danger of expiring from sheer politeness.
It’s a shame that “Artificially Intelligent” is less than two minutes long, because its hiccuping spray of pipe organ and wordless voice is by far the album’s most original moment, translating Frahm’s acoustic palette into a form somewhere between Morse code, abstract expressionism, and the markings on seismograph scrolls. But the final two songs are worth waiting for: The hypnotic “All Armed” is a sidewinding cross between Shackleton and Jon Hassell, while “Amirador” layers rich, deep, organ-like synthesizer tones into a shifting ambient etude of filmic proportions. It suggests a new direction for Frahm’s music, albeit one that it doesn’t seem like he’s quite figured out yet. Nearly four minutes of the 14-minute piece are virtually silent—as though, finding himself at a crossroads, Frahm were holding his breath, waiting for fresh inspiration to strike.
Buy: Rough Trade
