Music for Animals

The piano is at the heart of Nils Frahm’s music. The Berlin musician’s earliest releases were solo piano affairs. On 2011’s *Felt*, he applied preparations to hammers and strings; in 2015, he founded Piano Day, a celebration of the instrument. But on *Music for Animals*, which follows 2021’s solo piano record *Old Friends New Friends*, Frahm closes the cover on his keyboard and, instead, busies himself with his studio full of vintage and analog synthesizers. Begun during the first year of the pandemic, when the world pressed pause on daily life, it basks in an almost reverent sense of calm. Chords unfurl patiently against a backdrop of velvety reverb. There are few distractions and little harmonic development—just abiding quiet and sparkling focus. The pinging arpeggios of “Sheep in Black and White” recall the clockworks of Frahm’s live shows rendered in slow motion and zero gravity; the languid “Do Dream” drapes a wheezing pump organ in negative space. Three hours long and soft as a whisper, *Music for Animals* is a breathtakingly beautiful ode to stillness and solitude.

Nils Frahm returns with an expansive new album, ‘Music For Animals‘, his first fresh studio material since 2018’s ‘All Melody’ and 2019’s associated ‘All Encores’. Containing ten tracks and clocking in at over three hours long, it’s an ambitious and compelling set different to anything Frahm’s released to date – in fact, it finds the Piano Day founder declining to use a piano – but at the same time retains many of the qualities that have set the influential musician’s work apart over much of the last two decades. Unfolding at an unhurried, meditative pace in a celebration of tone, timbre and texture – and thus of sound itself – ‘Music For Animals‘ offers an unusually immersive experience. “My constant inspiration,” Frahm explains, “was something as mesmerising as watching a great waterfall or the leaves on a tree in a storm. It’s good we have symphonies and music where there’s a development, but a waterfall doesn’t need an Act 1, 2, 3, then an outcome, and nor do the leaves on a tree in a storm. Some people like watching the leaves rustle and the branches move. This record is for them”. ‘Music For Animals‘ is a substantial collection that encourages listeners to bask in its tranquility at their chosen depth, demanding only as much attention as they wish to contribute. As Frahm himself happily points out, “It all comes back to that waterfall. If you want to watch it, watch it. If you don’t, then you don’t have to. It will always be the same, yet never quite the same.” Indeed, that’s Music For Animals’ greatest strength. Instantly recognisable, it’s still like nothing else.

Trading his customary piano for a mostly electronic palette, the Berlin composer conjures an air of stillness and solitude. The results are both meditative and, at three hours long, sprawling.

Nils Frahm's Music for Animals is a three-hour work meant to evoke an experience similar to spending time in nature and staring at flora or bodies of water -- something without a specific progression or outcome. Its title riffs on the proliferation of functional playlists on streaming services, and society's insistence on attaching a purpose to music and grouping recordings by certain listening habits. Of course, ambient music is generally used as a soundtrack for sleeping, meditation, or any number of daily activities, and Music for Animals works on those levels as well, but Frahm isn't suggesting how the audience is supposed to engage with the release. He's simply presenting it and saying that it exists, just like mountains, or forests, or rivers. The album's ten compositions are lengthy and minimal, with several coming close to half an hour each. None of them feature acoustic pianos, but it's hard to tell if the sounds are entirely generated by synthesizers or if other instruments are involved -- the fragile, wheezing "Do Dream" was almost certainly created using a harmonium.

Nils Frahm's Music for Animals is for those who don't mind taking ten minutes to let a chord come to full bloom as their patience leads to truly transcendent moments.