This appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.
Nils Frahm has become one of today’s great one-man bands. He travels the world with enough equipment to fill a professional recording studio, hauls it from city to city, venue to venue, sets up shop for a day or two, and then noodles live to the adoration of fans who marvel at his ambidexterity, his technological fluency, and his theatricality. Brian Eno once suggested that the studio was itself an instrument, and while what Frahm does these days with that concept is in many ways the opposite of what Eno meant, it still works.
It’s also, by all appearances, exhausting. Hence Frahm’s recent album, Day (it came out March 1), on which he retreats from overkill, returning to the simple solo acoustic piano compositions that made him something of an emo ambient heartthrob in the first place.
https://nilsfrahm.bandcamp.com/album/day
The close microphones capture his playing in all its evocative interiority: the mechanisms of the keys, the ins and outs of his breathing, and creaks in the floorboards. At one point you hear a dog barking, echoing down a hallway. The album feels like a series of wordless entries in a wordless diary from a stint in tech-addiction rehab. The intimacy is kind of intoxicating in its own way, though you do have to sort out if these are compositions or one-time noodly improvisations — and whether that matters, given how great it is to listen to.