[Nils Frahm](https://flaunt.com/content/people/nils-frahm)’s newest album, [_Old Friends New Friends_](https://open.spotify.com/album/1Urrycrm9pFy2F3xSoQ3fj?si=GY13ddxlRmu5LQlieNLvEw), is out now on Leiter. The 23 piaono compositions all recorded between 2009 and 2021 are what’s been left from previous projects. During time in isolation, Frahm went to his archive, and upon seeing the breadth of recordings that have remained unheard, he revisited his favorites. _Old Friends New Friends_ is more of a collection—a stitching together of patches left in a box for safekeeping, hoping one day they may see the light of day.
Read below as Frahm enlightens us on putting these tracks together on _Old Friends New Friends_, old school sensibilities, the formats by which we listen to music, and more.
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**What is it about this particular collection that's so separate, but cohesive, that's enticing to you?**
I have a sweet spot for collections, which are put together by the band or the artists which made them. Usually there's some more value for me, personally, to the idea that the band maybe went through the tapes or archives. A good friend of mine runs a label called Miasma. With the band Volcano the Bear, they put out a box set of unreleased and some crazy material as well. Really, really amazing box. And so I'm not against that.
I really see how songs should be put together. Like this is the first song, the last song. Or maybe don't put the song in there at all, where maybe other people would have had put it in the first spot. I feel happy with it, but obviously I'm more happy when you like it.
**There's value in taking that time to slow down. Work with what you have, be happy with the simple things. I think some of the best stuff comes out of that rather than just this go, go, go. You're quite dedicated to the album format. How do you think the format serves your music? Do you think that the single, streaming-fueled format serves music?**
It is a good question. I'm not sure if it's music, but it sure serves the musician and team around the musician, which are very important people you need to address. And people need to make some money in this business. I don't want to sound naive and be like, oh, “This is all bad for the soul” and whatever.
There are bad things with vinyl as well. First of all, it can sound really bad and crackly and muddy. It's plastic. We don't like plastic. and we don't like to ship things around. Versus the debate, which is only starting now, on how watching movies on Netflix and listening to music really costs you when you calculate it in watts. And then people realize, oh, maybe a CD is actually quite an efficient media, you know? And then other people, "oh, but you cannot recycle it because it's two materials, and you cannot separate them, and it's really bad stuff."
I don't want to make it too complicated of an answer, but I'm not sure if it serves music. I've never really thought about if that is possible, but I think if you want to serve music, you would build a really great concert hall and make it sound as good as possible and make it a great experience for everybody. I think this way, to serve music by building a big streaming platform—it's really hard to say if that's better than it is worse. I would say for me personally, it's not so interesting. I'm not using these platforms in my life other than doing research or somebody sends me a link and I have to check it out.
But if I want to just hear music and don't worry about anything and have dinner or whatever, I play records or play my own files, mostly, which I have on my hard drive. And now I learned that this is actually quite an energy-efficient way of listening to music. I would still suggest keeping your music on your hard drive in a good quality, not streaming it all the time is actually worth considering. But it is a lot of work to get the music and get organized enough. Everybody still remembers the days of iTunes. People can't bother and I understand that, but I just want to say, see it in a positive way.
You know, you take care of your vinyl, you take care of your archive. You order it in a different way or you throw some things out that you don't want to have anymore. Personally, I like that. It's a great hobby to have and it brings me closer to music. And by spending some time taking care of all of that, I feel like I served the music personally.
**With _Old Friends, New Friends_, I noticed that there's a handful of tracks that are under two minutes, which isn't totally out of your realm, but it's a bit more atypical, because a lot of your music does tend to stretch into the 5, 6, 7, up to the 10 minute marks. It almost kind of felt like little journal entries of the past 10+ years of this music. Do you see this as kind of capturing the particular moments that you were making these works over that time?**
Yeah, I think it's more like an off note. Like you said, like a journal of works which were never realized, or I had the problem with whatever song at that moment. I couldn't just fit it on any album, which I was working on at the time. It was maybe too similar to another song I already had. It felt like having two on one album, so you throw one out. And some were just weird and short. For this compilation, I also made that one song, “All Numbers End” which is now 1:40 or something. Before, a couple of months ago it was nine minutes long. I knew I liked the song, but I also knew it was way too long, and I never had time to just make an edit.
When I was editing it, I didn't even realize how short it got. I felt it was maybe short, but not that short. And when the single was coming out and I saw a link on YouTube, I saw how short it was. I was actually like what? Maybe, maybe I made a mistake and I forgot a minute somewhere.
**Do you imagine the kind of environment that you're creating works in and putting songs together to be a record of that particular moment? Or since you are kind of revisiting something from so many years ago and changing it, that it transcends a particular moment?**
I have to think about it, but I think it's both.
**Have all these pieces been named before? Or did you kind of start to name each song as you're putting this record together. And then what was like the process of putting all that together?**
Finding 23 titles was a little bit of work. I did that way too late, as always. I feel like I did the master, and I did the music, and then, just before it comes out, I get the same email each time, _we need this information_. We _need titles, we need this information_. And I think I just sat down one night and then I looked at it the next morning and changed one or two names. But listening to it myself when a song has two minutes, I have two minutes to come up with the title, and I don't really know how to do it. Sometimes I feel like a song needs to have the title, which underlines whatever the mood is. And sometimes the song needs whatever is not in the song in the title. And I think these titles are usually a little bit better.
I love how Stanley Kubrick puts music, which is not in the image, to give even more emotion to whatever the moment should be. And he would never underline whatever is visible in the photo. He wouldn't ever underline it to make it stronger. That is usually what Hollywood wants.
I think there can be a chance to broaden it a little bit, but I hope they really don't rely on the titles. I just don't want to number them in a weird way.
**Not to pick favorites, but while I was listening to "Rain Take", I couldn’t help but be entranced by it. Could you take me back to recording that?**
I think I was just keeping the window open and I was testing whatever mic setup in my flat in Berlin where I was recording for 10 years basically. And it was really late as usual. I had a phase where I would never get up before one or two in the afternoon and work until 5, 4, 6 in the morning. And then when everybody else would wake up, I would go to bed to avoid the crowd. So it must have been really late and I didn't think of recording something otherwise I would have probably closed the windows, out of routine.
And so when I was maybe doing a test recording, I played that, and later I decided I liked that. I'm not doing that anymore so much, but we use a lot of parallel compression on the recording. And I pushed a really crazy compression setting on one microphone to make that rain always come in when there's a pause of the music. Then you basically hear the release time of the compressor. My ears got tired of that eventually, but I liked that back then.
**Any final remarks?**
I think the record is easy going, just a lot of tracks which are short. And, they should be enjoyed and not over-thought too much.
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