Behind the Tapes: Nils Frahm — All Melody

Nils Frahm thrives on working in short bursts, fitting creative moments in between touring. Much of his work is created in a matter of days, preserving the sentiment behind them and his original intentions. 

While this approach served him well throughout his musical life, All Melody arose from a much longer period of gestation. Building his own studio and then working in it over several months was a “luxury” that he felt wouldn’t make his music stronger, but rather, give him space to ask some unanswered questions. What he discovers is an expansive sound, fusing alien synths with resonant, earthy tones – it’s sombre and melancholy but deeply soothing.

Only a few days after finishing All Melody, Nils held transatlantic playback and interview sessions, meaning the album was still raw and fresh to all involved. These sessions quickly become emotionally charged, but also result in playful, philosophical conversation. 

Nils was not afraid to jump into challenging topics: the difference between “real” vs digital orchestration, how art can help you to slow down, how All Melody was inspired by the ambition of 70s albums and why focusing on creating a suite is more important to him than making viral tracks.

Here are some extracts from three of these sessions: Nils talks about building his Berlin studio in conversation with Mary Anne Hobbs at the Erased Tapes Sound Gallery in East London, composition and design with WNYC host John Schaefer at the Oswald Mill Audio showroom in Brooklyn, and youthful ambition at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu.

To hear the audio version of this conversation, listen here.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

For those of you who are new to this period in Nils’s creative life, we thought it would be nice to offer a trilogy bundle, which includes All Melody, All Encores and Tripping with Nils Frahm — a live recording of his homecoming performance at Funkhaus in Berlin, that shows the evolution of this material after his All Melody world tour, recorded next door to where it was originally conceived.

Q&A with Mary Anne Hobbs at the Erased Tapes Sound Gallery

Robert Raths: Safe to say that even if we have heard it once or twice in its final form, [All Melody] is still a very fresh beast, and we are still trying to get our heads around it. Which is a beautiful thing. And that’s the reason why we wanted everyone to be a part of that moment, because you only have it once. To actually share it with friends.

And this is what Nils did in his studio last night, and we wanted to take that concept and bring this as close as possible to the studio atmosphere. Please feel at home, just imagine this is Nils’s studio. I do hope that one day you will be able to visit it, it is very special.

NF: Some of the songs are from my recent live shows, and some are from a couple of years ago and I just never had time to record them. I knew I needed to find a way to incorporate everything I like about music in one record. 

But to do this, I needed to expand my universe of sounds to fit my self-made orchestra inside. I wanted to use choirs, and combinations with percussion for a long time, and I felt like this was my chance to do it. 

I wanted to explore my synthesisers and effects boxes. And, last but not least, the complete mixing board, which we built over two years basically, with a couple of friends. We got this ready just in time for the mixdown of the record, which was part of getting all the effects and life out of it. And so it was my dream to be more like an engineer, mix my records, and so that was also fulfilled. 

MAH: I visited Nils in January to see this very beautiful studio. I’m sure many of you have seen the photograph online of the golden room where Nils was abiding and working, but there’s a little room off to one side, and Nils had made a tiny impromptu bed in the ground, it was literally little more than a sleeping bag and a pillow. 

It was the abiding memory that I took away from the studio because I thought: “I don’t know if this is a man who is ever going to leave this place.” And to me, it’s such an amazing emblem of the commitment that he has to the project and the idea that you just entirely immerse yourself in the process.

NF: Yeah, I wanted to use the time I had. For the last seven or eight years, I was always on tour, and I felt that my body and soul was fragmented in many pieces all over the globe. I needed time to pull it all together. 

I used this time to renovate the studio, which took six months. I wasn’t listening to music, playing piano, making music – I was just working on the studio. And after that I had another ten months of just making music as much as I wanted to. I knew that once that was over, I would go on tour again and not be able to explore things in the studio.

So being able to take all the time I needed was a big luxury, because I was getting pretty good at making the most out of having no time. So I have produced a lot of records that I played in a couple of days and mixed in another evening, then released it. 

People liked it, and I got used to doing this. I thought: “OK, I can’t make a better record when I spend twelve months or even three or five years.” But it doesn’t matter if it’s a better record, as I will learn a lot if I do this rather than just spend four or five days on it and start playing the same old songs again. So this was definitely an investment in my passion. 

MAH: Tell us about some of the collaborators who came in on this record? Who did you choose?

Nils Frahm: First, all of my good friends like Anne Müller, she played some cello and she helped me create some sounds for the mellotron. And there is the trumpet player Richard Koch who came in for one day, and he just killed it, you know? He’s a jazz player, he just listened to it on the first take, played something and I was stunned. I kept some of it just as he did it. Also, the bass marimba player FS Blumm from Hamburg. He’s also a fantastic solo musician, does great work and has a self-made bass marimba, which you also hear. 

And the solo piano tracks underneath the notes, so it sounds bigger and deeper. I did that before with synthesisers, but I felt like it was more natural with a bass marimba. The bass marimba and upright piano combination was pretty nice. 

Then there is the choir, conducted by Kieran Brunt, who is based in London. He’s a young chap I think 22, 23 or something. He has a really wonderful 12-piece choir ensemble, [Shards] — six guys, six girls. They sang for me at the Barbican festival. It was really engaging and I felt we needed to do something on the record with him. So it was the first studio session for the ensemble, a lot of them just coming from school. You feel that passion that they bring to the record – it was great. 

Q&A with John Schaefer at Oswalds Mill Audio

JS: Did you see this as a kind of a related series, a suite of pieces that all fit together, that were interrelated somehow?

NF: Yeah I really like the idea of making an album. An album which is mostly like a world in itself, and a place you can go to, and a place which you build.

JS: So how much of this was composed in advance? I mean, you’ve published the sheets, pieces for piano that are completely composed. How much of this was fixed in your mind when you went into the studio and how much of it was Brian Eno-style, where you’re in the studio and trying something, and maybe something surprises you?

NF: I think maybe 30% was in my mind, and the rest just occurred.

JS: And did it surprise you? 

NF: Yes. Actually, I was hoping that something would surprise me. I thought “OK, I hope I will do one thing which I don’t know what it is, but it will just be there, and just sitting next to you. And you get to meet it.”

I think the track for me is the one we just heard at the end, with the organ, which is going bonkers and the choir’s coming in. That was something I didn’t imagine and in the first half, there’s a slow, downbeat piece where the choir comes in, who sing louder and louder and louder. That’s a piece that surprised me as well. 

JS: So I first heard this album on some crappy computer computer speakers yesterday, but hearing it on this setup today, it’s a completely different experience. My first reaction to the album was “I’m not sure what I’m hearing.” 

Now tonight, hearing it through these speakers on this system, I had the same reaction to different parts of the album. Some of the instrumental timbres were like “Well, is that a real choir, or is that a patch? Is that a real horn? Is it a synthesiser?” You’re kind of playing with our expectations and what we are hearing, and what we are identifying as analogue or digital, instrumental or synthesised. 

NF: Yeah, that’s right. When you have for example one trumpet, and you just add a patch of a synthesiser or something else, it easily starts to sound like an orchestra around the trumpet. That’s because we have a soundtrack in our head, which sounds like that. So we can trick our ears – and I can trick my ears  – with that. But in the end, what was more important to me was that everything is made by humans. 

Everything is kind of real. For example, when you use a plugin Mellotron, it is probably the same one that everybody else is using. So it doesn’t really matter which one you have. But you look in this room and no speaker – even though they are the same – will sound the same, because the wood is different and when [placed] in a room there’s an originality to the sound. 

I wanted original instruments to happen on the album. I thought: If I piled up this mountain of something original, maybe something super original will appear, and something that does not need to be atonal. So this is a reference to [the title] “All Melody”: I love melodies, I love melodic music. And I wanted to do something that would surprise me. Something that I couldn’t really find in my record collection. 

JS: Well that’s also interesting, because you’re playing as well with what our sense of melody can be. Because traditionally a melody is something like Nessun dorma by Giacomo Puccini or Yesterday by The Beatles. But your melodic sense seems to grow out of some of these chord progressions and the interplay of different lines, as opposed to: “Here’s the melody and here underneath is the accompaniment.” 

NF: I think when the melody is too bold in your face, it gets a little bit tiring after hearing it too often. So I try to avoid that, I try to modulate certain melodies, and they form chords in one way, but also when you listen to them separately, they form different melodies. 

JS: So you have this contrapuntal…

NF: A little bit. Nothing but melody. Just keeping that in mind. 

JS: So what’s the digital versus analogue on this record? When you’re in your studio in Berlin, are you a purist about it? Does everything have to be analogue, or is there room for digital? Do you use digital synthesisers, for example?

NF: Yes, I mean, that is the funny thing with synthesisers, because they would brand the synthesiser in whatever was fashionable at the time. Right? So just imagine in the 80s, they were developing the first digital synthesisers. And so they would brand them as digital synthesisers, and everyone wanted to have one. But in the end it was all analogue circuits around one little digital chip. 

So today, we like these old 80s digital synthesisers because they have a lot of analogue filters and so on. And when you really think about it, there is no disgrace between analogue and digital – even the most scientific computer developers smile about this question. They usually go: “Actually, there is no real digital vs analogue, even a computer has analogue foundations.” And nobody can really explain where the break is. 

So I don’t want to create a fight between these two worlds, I like the computer only for the things computers can do. And I like the piano for the things only pianos can do. And so I would like to use it all to my benefit. 

JS: But there’s an interesting thing that’s happened in the world of electronic music which parallels Bach and the early music renaissance, the period performance practice revival, people who are interested in the question: “What did the instruments really sound like in Bach’s day?” 

A similar thing has happened in electronic music, where people really are interested in “What was special about the VCS3 in the 1970s? What was special about the Fairlight CMI in the early 80s?” These instruments get tied to a particular place and time, and so when you use them, they mean more than just what the sound is.

NF: But do you know why that is? They are all originals. So I think all of these instruments you would call out – what unifies them is that somebody really famous played it, they were originals, so they became timeless.

For me, it’s really satisfying to make really beautiful music with an instrument I’ve found, that I repaired with some gaffa tape, and put a really expensive microphone on, OK? I play whatever comes out of it, and think: “Well, this can only really happen at this moment, just for me.” It’s important for me to have a sound that I own in some way.

JS: When you were just talking about the instruments you repair with duct tape, maybe it came from the street and you put a really good microphone on it – people might think you’re talking in generalities, but you really have done that right?

NF: Sure! And it inspires people to do something like that, however they do it. When I played the toilet brushes on the piano, it makes people see a lot of things in it. People can use some of that approach for whatever they do. I think I like the inspiration that comes from it. We don’t need to spend five thousand bucks on a Stratocaster. 

This is why I like Steve Reich’s Clapping Music – *starts clapping* – because you can just do it wherever and you don’t need to spend any money on it.

Q&A with the audience at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio

Robert Raths: This guy has been working with me for eight years now. And I was sitting right there, and every time we listen to this record, some other song makes me cry… *audience laughs*

So maybe a little something about why we’re together in this beautiful place today. Because basically, we all agree that music is not something that we’re trying to sell somebody. It’s really to be shared, and it’s something that Nils has been investing in over the last two years, building a studio, making work in that studio. And as we were talking about how we could share this with the world, it felt really strange to just send it through a digital device to someone sitting in an office… I would like to thank Rick for opening his doors to us, and us being able to listen in this ideal way.

Rick Rubin: What was the first instrument that you played?

NF: In my life? It must have been some bongo, probably, because they were just in my height line, on the floor! And once I could reach the piano, standing up, I was playing piano. When I was 13, I played in my first band and I got a Fender Rhodes, a Juno 60, and a Moog Prodigy (which back then was so cheap). 

But then I was really into the electric use of piano, I liked all the crazy-looking keyboards onstage. I watched all of this VHS footage, trying to read the back of these instruments. And then you kind of have to buy them just in some magazine, when you look for used gear. So that became kind of a sport: more keyboards. Because a synthesiser is easy when you can play piano. But with these keyboards, you have a new language. 

Jason Lader: Is there an instrument you remember finding and feeling most excited about?

NF: It was a celeste, which is a glockenspiel but with full range and lots of octaves, which means you play the bells as a keyboard. It’s a very rare instrument, you mainly find it in orchestras. I found it in a book shop, and he gave it to me for 100 bucks. He thought it was a real piano! So that was my best find. 

Audience member: I’m curious as to how this record reflects Berlin now, and the scene there, the people and the sounds.

NF: I can only speak for myself. I think it mostly reflects what I feel like I have to do. I shut down listening to other peoples’ music in the process of making the record, just to not get sidetracked or get any doubt. You don’t want to listen to something really fucking good when you do something all of a sudden mediocre. So I think it’s a good idea to take yourself out of that zone. 

I need to watch that I’m not listening to Keith Jarrett every day! I did it when I was a child and there’s tons of it in me — I just need to decide what I really want to use as inspiration. Having an instrument as a starting point is more effective in helping you make music that sounds more like you.

It’s what I have to sacrifice; I’m a music lover at heart but you have to find a balance. 

Audience member: What were the different emotions you were going through in creating this project? I mean after two years building a studio from scratch.

NF: I felt like I needed to make the bravest possible music I could create, just to remember the time I was making a record, just for the sake of making an album. This is inspired almost by the 70s type of album, which had long pieces on them and would be listened to in a session. I was wanting to make a statement, and just to succeed in this, basically. 

This project made me feel really strong. But on the flipside, it made me feel very crushed about a lot of things around us, which I don’t think I need to explain to everybody. It’s beautiful to me to put all of these feelings into the music, especially into the quieter things, that reflect a desire to slow people down in a way. 

This is my fight. I want to be slower as well, and I think we are in a time where we speed up but don’t really know why. And so I think my music can be a contribution to sabotaging that.