Barbican, London
Germany’s cult king of ambient piano charmed London with his uplifting arpeggios, artful dial-twiddling and… toilet brushes
When he was a boy, Nils Frahm was taught to play the piano by a stern Russian, Nahum Brodsky, who himself had been taught by a pupil of Tchaikovsky’s. When Frahm’s hands fly across a grand piano tonight – the lid removed, so that its innards are exposed, the better to be hit by toilet brushes – you can be in no doubt of this 35-year-old’s pedigree and his incandescent classical chops. Frahm’s left hand will build an insistent rhythm, and his right will run up and the down the keys, arpeggiating wildly.
Sometimes, Frahm will kick off a black-and-white Adidas trainer with the intensity of it all; afterwards, he will towel himself off like a rock star. And Frahm is something of a rock star, albeit one without a leather boot on the monitor. This German pianist is also an analogue keyboard ninja, an acoustics nerd, and the poster boy for a classical crossover genre (neoclassical, post-classical, the unwieldy labels go on and on) indebted to jazz, ambient electronic music and much time spent clubbing.
You spend much time bobbing violently in your seat to the ghost of a snare drum, to an implied beat
Continue reading...by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian
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