9. Nils FrahmSpaces
I was just about to go to Falmouth to study music and art, and I had just started my journey in piano. I Googled something like ‘records by people that play like Keith Jarrett’. I saw the Pitchfork review for Spaces. It was not what I expected. I’d heard some musique concrète, but I’d never heard a track like ‘Said And Done’, where he just plays the one note and three chords in the whole track and it’s nine minutes long.
He’s definitely the person I’ve seen most in concert. I must have seen him 15 or 16 times since 2012. That’s just how incredible I think he is. You go to a Nils Frahm concert and it’s like, this is what greatness looks like. This is what’s going to bring me to that level of commitment. You hear stories about how Coltrane used to practice 24 hours a day. I was really, really committed to being good, especially in art school. I still am, I’m still very hungry, but also trying to be as healthy as possible. But there’s a maddening desire to be great, and those records really influence that.
The reason I fell in love with and wanted to do classical stems from what these guys were doing because it felt like such a great way to meld electronica and ambience. I couldn’t really do that as a solo artist, but I saw people like Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm melding that classical world with a lot of the electronica I love, the beautiful Roland synths, and being fresh with the idea of performance, of what a piano can sound like live. Those things were so inspiring to me, it just made me want to embark on that journey.
I’ve wanted to do it since I heard that first Spaces record, but I’m only just getting good enough to really do it now. I just need to get a lot of that other experimental electronica noise out of myself to get to this point.
