Transcendent Ingenuity: Nils Frahm in Toronto

Multifaceted composer Nils Frahm is an aberration. Amid the bustle and sprawl and perplexity of city life, Frahm’s music provides the comforting, convalescing embrace of an antidote to the relentless weight of modernity. The allure of his neoclassical-fusion compositions is in their latent restorative powers; like tranquil, delay-action sonic sedatives. For the better part of two years, Frahm was holed up in a Berlin’s Funkhaus studio in a dwelling of his own creation, building and experimenting free of cumbersome externalities. In an interview with Exclaim last month he said “I didn’t Twitter, I didn’t use Facebook, I was just basically trying to make the best I could in that time. It’s a big luxury to have so much time and it’s a big luxury to not use Facebook and to not be distracted and to focus, really, on something really old school. I just like building things with my hands. My whole obsession with real instruments is also that I can open them and use mechanical techniques to change the sound.” Now making the rounds promoting the fruits of this labor, his superbly evocative new record All Melody, Frahm finds himself in a position that few of his contemporaries could hope to