Nils Frahm’s 2012 Screws EP is the gift that keeps on giving, not just because it was made available for free download, and continues to be available for free (at screws.nilsfrahm.com), but because variations on his intimate themes, all recorded on piano when one of his fingers was inactive due to an injury, continue to pop up at unexpected intervals. Such asynchronous serendipity is one of the underlying pleasures of music produced amid a culture informed by the Creative Commons, in which non-commercial reworkings of existing material is encouraged, even rewarded. Back in January 2013, shortly after the year anniversary of the Disquiet Junto weekly music project series, we did a group take on the Screws audio, and 51 of those tracks are still online. More recently, as an example of the album’s continued existence as a source of inspiration, Fred Yaddaden of Lyon, France, committed an elegantly rhythmic reworking of the Screws track “Fa.” It opens with some scratchy sounds, resembling the surface noise often employed as a signifier of authenticity in hip-hop, but here quite likely lifted from the noises that result from Frahm’s penchant for using close microphones to capture the gestural intimacy of performance. From there he curtails much of the willfully meandering original and structures from it a simple, patient new track.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/fred-yaddaden. More from Yaddaden, who is based in Lyon, France, at lzorecords.com.