Says

Says is the second track on Spaces and was first heard as a premiere in Interview magazine in September 2013. Like the rest of the album it was taken from a concert in 2012 or 2013 and mixed by Frahm at Durton. Showing The Quietus his Roland Juno-60, he said it was the synthesizer he plays Says on, and described the piece as what can be done with one delay and an old synthesizer, without computers.

A looping, arpeggiated synth pattern slowly opens up through its filter while the piano comes in above it. Resident Advisor heard a meek piano figure over a rippling synth bed, rising to a climax where his increasingly frenzied playing becomes the human element. Pitchfork placed it 47th among the best tracks of 2014, with Andrew Rice writing that it came closest to capturing a Frahm concert.

The video

Romain Assénat and Ana Silva made the video with Atelier Graphoui, improvising with inks on glass and a video-feedback device and capturing it in one take without post-production. Frahm said they wanted images that matched the repeating form and the echo in the piece. The idea came at one of his shows in Germany, and the rig was built two days later. Erased Tapes released it in January 2014.

Afterlife

Sven Väth put it on his mix Coming Home and Deetron on Fabric 76, both in 2014, and Vessels and Monolink made their own versions. In 2019 the album recording closed the soundtrack of James Gray's Ad Astra on Deutsche Grammophon. It is the song Frahm has played most in concert, with 123 performances logged on setlist.fm, and it featured in his KEXP session in Seattle in 2013 and at his BBC Proms debut in 2015. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same Spaces recording, one as the official video.