Tripping with Nils Frahm is an illustration of Nils lauded ability as a composer and passionate live artist as well as the enchanting atmosphere of his captivating, and already legendary Funkhaus shows: An extraordinary musical trip rare and exclusive, close and intimate, bringing a unique concert experience to the screen. Recorded at Berlins historic Funkhaus in 2018, this live album sounds uniformly gorgeous and features the composer and his passel of gear working dutifully as a well-oiled machine.

Nils Frahms dominant mode is the eyes-closed fantasia: immersive, rapturous, sentimental. That goes for his post-classical solo-piano work, which is indebted to both Keith Jarrett and George Winston, as well as his surging electronic pieces, which translate the grammar of classical minimalism into the language of techno. His music favors fluid lines and wistful melodies; even when it throbs, it prizes beauty, lyricism, and elegance.

Frahms showmanship was on full display in December 2018, when he set up at Berlins historic Funkhausa former East German radio headquarters, where he keeps his own recording studiofor four consecutive nights of performances. He played in the round, a castaway on a small island of gear, by turns manic, melancholy, and mild. Tripping With Nils Frahm, which boils down choice moments from those four nights into a 76-minute album, is more polished than his 2013 live album, Spaces, a compendium of two years of live performances. That collection acknowledged both spontaneity (Improvisation for Coughs and a Cell Phone) and the constant possibility of failure (An Aborted Beginning, an ambient dub sketch that peters out after 94 seconds), but on the new one, he and his passel of gear are a well-oiled machine.

The album, split between delicate solo piano pieces and billowing, groove-driven electronic improvisations, is largely drawn from his 2018 album All Melody and its outtakes collection, All Encores. What might be most surprising is how faithful his live renditions are to the original studio recordings. Without seeing itsomething possible in an accompanying concert film, which includes 11 minutes worth of extra musicit can be hard to imagine how Frahm manages to do so much with just two hands. In Sunson, he juggles slow-motion techno with Mellotron counterpoints, cascading pipe organs, and the occasional Rhodes melody; Fundamental Values makes room for ambient pulses, Windham Hill-like piano solo, operatic vocal samples, and a heart-in-mouth climax whose double-time percussion is reminiscent of Autechres Lost. The crowd-pleasing All Melody stretches the originals nine and a half minutes to more than 14, drawing out the tension inherent in his tumbling arpeggios. Sprawl is par for the course. Five of the albums eight songs are more than 10 minutes long; Fundamental Values takes a four-minute album cut and blows it up to more than 14.

The sound throughout is gorgeous. Frahm is serious about his gearhe owns 11 Roland RE-501 Chorus Echoes, and uses five of them on stageand that obsessiveness translates into truly incredible sound: sumptuous, nuanced, enveloping. He favors instruments with striking visceral sonorities, and he knows how to get the most out of the contrast between them. Some of the albums most electrifying moments happen when he turns the sampled sounds of a pipe organ into an icy cascade of staccato tone bursts. But a nagging sense of sameness nevertheless settles in over the course of the record. All Melody and #2 amount to a 25-minute set of theme and variations; the arpeggios and steady pulse of Sunson feel cut from the same cloth, and Fundamental Values reprises ideas from all three. The albums most rewarding stretch is My Friend the Forest and The Dane, a pair of related solo piano pieces where he strips away the bells and whistles and lets his harmonic sensibilities shine. (via Erased Tapes)

Label: Erased Tapes Records ERATP136LP

Format: 2 Vinyl, LP, Album

Released: 2021

Genre: Electronic, Classical

Style: Modern Classical, Minimal, Ambient, Live