If you haven't heard of Frahm, where do I begin? He's a master at blending smooth piano compositions while seamlessly sneaking in gorgeous synthesizer noises at certain points. Most of his music is played live and he has done several collaborations over the last decade. Each album and collaboration uniquely represents itself. He has too many releases for me to review each one, so I'll just scratch the surface a little to get you familiar with his work.
Felt- 2011
I believe this was the first Frahm album I heard. I've been on a writing rampage myself so my ears are more absorbent specifically of production quality and song arrangements. This has it all. The coolest thing is listening to this delicate album loud. You can hear him shuffle around a bit in his seat, you can hear the floors creek, it's all just as evenly mixed as the piano itself. It sounds like you're laying inside the piano as he plays. The name "Felt" actually came after he applied dampening felts to his piano to be kind to his close neighbors. He realized he liked the delicate sound the piano was making and decided to revolve this album around putting the mics much, much closer to the piano strings to pick more up. It was an interesting production sound, but more importantly the songs were amazing. Beautiful album.
Trance Frendz- 2016
This is my favorite as well as most recent album under all of Frahm's work. This was actually a collaboration with composer Ólafur Arnalds. The combination of these two is pure magic. With ambient music, there can be so much reworking, adding, or replacing. These two sat down together in Frahm's Berlin studio and improvised the entire album. This is a great example of the warm, electronic undertones over the improvised piano takes. It never ventures too far into "electronic" or synthetic sounding. I think it helps not having drum machines or any type of synth pads oscillating over top of the songs.
They had a videographer shoot the entire process. It was uploaded to Vimeo as well as YouTube. I can't recommend watching this enough!
The Bells- 2010
I could go on for hours on this guy, but I'll stop after this album. One of the most refreshing things about 90% of his work was always the consistency of material, without lacking depth. It's easy to just "jam" with a band and put whatever good or bad is done in that session out as albums. Typically those albums suck. The Bells is a go to album of mine when my mind won't stop wandering. There really isn't many tricks to this album instrumentally. It stays very stripped down with just piano for almost the entire record.
Everyone
has heard bands that have piano, but they're usually backed with a live
band or follow some type of similar structures. Nils stay true without
drums, guitars, or any other typical band sounds even when performing
live. It's captivating melodies done in such a clever, emotional way.
-Novak