FAMILIAR ETERNITIES
WITH COMPOSER
NILS FRAHM
I think of your music as being in conversation with the past yet always having an eye on the future. Has that duality always been part of your practice and the idea of what you wanted to create?
I’ve always been driven by wanting to have my own sound. But on the other hand, I’ve always been really affected by pieces of art which feel timeless, where somebody’s datedness or ego completely dissolves, and you don’t know if it’s from now or the future or a thousand years ago. I like that alienated familiarity, and I try to create that in my music. It’s almost like if you were to look into a black hole on the far side of the galaxy for a close friend and then you find that friend there. Maybe it’s something that can only happen in music, to find the void of eternity and complete infinity in sounds—distant universes and galaxies that I want to explore, but to do so while holding the warm hand of somebody I know.
Was there someone who sparked that idea for you?
I’ll always say that musical inspiration comes from people like Steve Reich or Brian Eno or Kraftwerk, visionaries who had a new sound and made that sound become their personal thing. In jazz there were so many great musicians who had their distinct sound, like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk on the piano or John Coltrane on the saxophone. I mean, John Coltrane...he speaks through the instrument. More recently, Arvo Pärt, a composer who writes timeless music which seems to be from somewhere else. A recommendation for everyone is Valentin Silvestrov, an underrated Ukrainian composer who writes the type of music I dream about writing.
Do you have a favorite everyday sound?
My favorite acoustic environments are where I don’t hear manmade sounds. In mountains where you have echoes coming from all different sides and maybe you just hear a bird hitting its wings together. The more complex the reverb is, the more excited I am. Some of the most beautiful sounds come from water in all forms. Motors are very boring, they’re like synthesizers that play no melody and it’s not so exciting. But I really like natural acoustics, and that tunes my hearing in the end because, when I’m in a city like Berlin and I’m listening to music for months and months and months every day, I often need one or two months without making music or listening to music.