There was a lot that I liked about Frahm’s concert: the audience was equal parts women and men; the fact that Frahm held our attention in varying amounts for an uninterrupted two hours by making (or triggering) all of the sounds himself; that he alternated between playing pensive solo piano pieces with more dub-groovy echoing sequenced-arpeggiated electronic material; that he took time to explain to us (in a charming and humble way) what he was doing and how some of the gear worked (“I brought this pipe organ with me on tour…”); that he wasn’t afraid to move between extremely quiet dynamics and chest-squashing loudness; that he took great liberties with rendering his recorded works (e.g. “A Place”, a standout track from his recent release was super slowed down) and made improvisation a key part of the show; that he used vintage analog electronic gear; that he brought an actual pipe organ with him (it was triggered from offstage); that he demonstrated how a hardware-based, unique techno-musical system can pay big sonic dividends in our era of software; that he played with the conventions of both classical music and electronic dance music idioms; and finally, that he did a lot in 6-beat meter, which is always a plus in my book. Let’s turn now to specifics.
Frahm’s talent is knowing how to mix a sense for rhythm with well-crafted melo-harmonic structures. Though Frahm is mainly a keyboardist (and part remixer, part triggerer and knob turner), it occurred to me halfway through the show that he is also, unquestionably, a Virtuoso of Delay. Frahm loves delay effects (e.g. echo boxes such as the Roland Space Echo) and this love is key to his music on two levels: delay allows him to create polyrhythms, and delay allows him to literally keep us waiting for what will happen next in the music. Many of his pieces begin with a synth arpeggio or a baseline or pipe organ stabs that cycle around in a rolling 6-beat meter. The arpeggio may be only a few notes, but it’s multiplied by echo effects that catch your ears unawares as the pitches bounce around the performance space, almost swarming into floating pods of polyrhythm. My guess is that Frahm will open and close various filters and change the settings on his machines to highlight different parts of the sequence, allowing select notes to ring out and send your listening off in new directions. This technique is beautiful in its simplicity because we see a relationship between Frahm’s onstage labor and the resulting changes in the music, and it also allows the music to grow organically through an improvising with otherwise fixed musical patterns. Some of the evening’s most exciting moments were when Frahm opened a filter to play with white noise through delay effects to create double-time drum ‘n’ bass snare patterns. The crowd loved these moments—the snares were accompanied by flashing strobe lights onstage—when the music’s texture intensified and things got harder and groovier. A guy standing next to me kept repeating “This is awesome! This is awesome! This is awesome!” It was awesome. In Frahm’s hands, delays create polyrhythm and literally multiply him.
Delay is also what Frahm does to grow his pieces by putting off substantial musical change until just before—and sometimes a bit after—the point when you think something needs to happen to keep things compelling. There’s always an audible, kinda classical, kinda minimalist processual logic in Frahm’s music. Typically, a piece might have a simple sequenced arpeggio (e.g. I-VII-I) over which Frahm fluidly solos on a Rhodes (but without blue notes or overt jazz influences). Eventually a bass line of sort emerges, but only once in a while on beats 1 and 4 over several repetitions of the sequence. It’s only after a minute that you realize what you thought was a 4-beat meter you were nodding your head to is actually in 6. The same delay applies to scale: it can take minutes for Frahm to hit a flattened 6th or 7th to reveal the piece’s full minor hue, and in the meantime where did those long tone dissonances floating above come from? Frahm has real patience for using time to build: the music keeps changing and growing—some vocal samples appear in reverb apparitions, bass notes become sub harmonic and boomy—yet the music’s repeating structure remains intact and perceptible. It can take many minutes, but the effect on the listener is always the same: this music isn’t simple.
Before his final piece, Frahm explained there would be an encore and then, just so there were wouldn’t be any surprises, explained exactly how that encore would unfold. It would be one of his most listened to pieces (according to Spotify streaming stats)— about six minutes in C minor, before it changed to some other chords. “I’m really boring” he joked, before running down those other chords. Then Frahm played the final piece, left the stage, and returned immediately for the encore—a solo piano piece was anything but boring. At the very end as he was doing a long acoustic fade out, I looked around me. Some of us were looking at the stage and some of us were looking at the floor, lost in the sounds. After two hours, he still had our attention.
If I had to critique anything about the concert, I think I speak for many in the audience who wished the loud-boomy-dubby parts had been expanded more. Frahm had the crowd’s nervous system in his hand when he played with the conventions of electronic dance music by applying his echoing 6-beat spin to it. I think we wanted more of that. In addition to extending the loud stuff, the quiet piano pieces could have been amplified louder while still preserving their dynamics. It was hard to hear their details from the back of the barn-like hall. (Perhaps this was a sound system issue?) And occasionally I wondered about the limitations of building pieces around harmonically static sequenced arpeggios; sometimes I hoped for a hard left turn beyond three or four chords. But these are quibbles. In all, Frahm’s performance raised questions: What is one supposed to do at it? Stand and watch? Head nod or dance in six? I like the ambiguity of Frahm’s answer: you can do whatever you want. Whether you get lost in the spaces inside its shifting rhythms, in its genre-bending, in its chords, in its ever-evolving timbral textures, or in its sustained moods, sometimes great music is about in-betweenness.
brettworks 