Nils Frahm

Hamburg and Berlin

Nils Oliver Frahm was born in Hamburg on 20 September 1982 and grew up near the city. His father, Klaus Frahm, is a photographer who designed covers for ECM Records. For about eight years he studied classical piano with Nahum Brodski, who lived in a neighbouring village and had been a pupil of Alexander Goldenweiser and Grigori Ginsburg, a line of teaching that reaches back to Tchaikovsky.

In 2006 he moved to Berlin to work as a technician rather than pursue an orchestral career, and he built his own studio there, Durton. His debut, Streichelfisch, came out on AtelierMusik in 2005, followed by Electric Piano in 2008 and The Bells and Wintermusik in 2009. In 2010 he made 7fingers with the cellist Anne Müller and began working with F.S. Blumm.

Felt and Screws

Felt (2011), his breakthrough on Erased Tapes, was recorded with felt laid over the piano hammers. The same year he made Wonders with Peter Broderick under the name Oliveray. In 2012 a thumb injury produced Screws, recorded while it healed and given to fans as a free download on his birthday, and he released Stare with Ólafur Arnalds, who became one of his most constant collaborators.

Spaces

Over 2012 and 2013 Frahm recorded more than thirty of his concerts, in different rooms and on different machines, from old portable reel-to-reel recorders to cassette decks. He then assembled the takes at Durton into what he called a collage of field recordings. Spaces, released by Erased Tapes in November 2013, mixes new pieces with reworked older ones, and The Arts Desk heard not a conventional live album but a seamless whole. It scored 90 on Metacritic, and The Observer found him mesmerising even while he battered the strings with a toilet brush.

Its centrepiece is Says, built from a delay and an old synthesizer, which Pitchfork placed among the best tracks of 2014. An ink-on-glass video followed in January 2014. The piece crossed into club culture through DJ mixes by Sven Väth and Deetron, closed the soundtrack of James Gray's Ad Astra in 2019, and is the song he has played most on stage.

I think a live album is almost impossible to accomplish.

Nils Frahm, 2013

Piano Day and Saal 3

In 2015 he founded Piano Day, a worldwide celebration held on the 88th day of each year, and released Solo, a nominee for the IMPALA Album of the Year. His score for Victoria won the German Film Prize for best film music, and in August he made his BBC Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall. Collaborative Works (2015) and Trance Frendz (2016) continued the partnership with Arnalds. He also scored ELLIS, a short film by JR, with Woodkid, and recorded with Nonkeen.

In 2016 he took over Saal 3, a studio in the 1950s East German Funkhaus building in Berlin, and spent two years rebuilding it. All Melody (2018) was made there, and its tour ran to more than 180 sold-out shows. Four December 2018 concerts at the Funkhaus became Tripping with Nils Frahm, a film by Benoit Toulemonde that premiered on MUBI in 2020.

LEITER

Empty arrived for Piano Day in 2020, and Graz (2021) was his last album for Erased Tapes. From around 2020 he has worked through LEITER, his own label and production company. Old Friends New Friends (2021), Durton and Music for Animals (2022), Day (2024) and Night (2025) followed, along with Paris, recorded live at the Philharmonie de Paris. In June 2022 he opened the Music For tour at Sydney Opera House, his first concerts since 2019. ARTE credits him with opening the way for a generation of artists who blend classical and electronic music.