“After a while, when you play piano for a long time, you want it to be more than maybe it is. “The piano can do certain things very well, and other things it can’t do very well,” Frahm says. Though Frahm trained as a classical pianist, he says he always saw the instrument as a machine to be tweaked, expanded and defied. CREDIT: Thomas Lallier/Courtesy of the artist And then, the next thing you know, he’s turning knobs and turning the track into some kind of dub techno piece.”įour nights onstage in Berlin in 2018 are the subject of Nils Frahm’s new concert film and soundtrack album, Tripping With Nils Frahm. “But he’s leaping around the stage, working up a sweat, and then suddenly stopping to perform some beautiful, intricate, intimate piece of music. “When I picture Nils, he’s like a Dickensian hipster,” music critic Wyndham Wallace says.
He’s one of the stars of a new wave of what’s been described as neoclassical, a movement takes traditional instruments like grand pianos out of concert halls and into clubs and indie theaters. German composer Nils Frahm creates songs that fuse electronic and classical music. In the new concert film Tripping with Nils Frahm, directed by Benoit Toulemonde, a small figure in a t-shirt and flat cap bounces around a Berlin stage - playing pianos and towering analog synthesizers, flipping switches, turning knobs and massaging keyboards in front of rapt audiences.