- Nils Frahm ditches the piano and fires up the synths for a three-hour LP of ultra-extended ambient compositions.
- Literary critic Elizabeth Miller recently described the period from the Industrial Revolution to World War II as the "long exhaustion." Her idea of exhaustion is meant to evoke both aesthetic and material changes. On the one hand, novels (the focus of her book) became longer, grappling with an increasingly complex world. At the same time, Earth was also becoming exhausted as its resources were depleted at an alarming speed. Miller goes on to argue that we remain stuck in this mode of exhaustion, unable to shake an overwhelming sense of fatigue. Nils Frahm's latest record, Music For Animals, also sounds steeped in exhaustion. Trading his piano for droning synths and strings, the album (like the novels Miller chronicles) is remarkably long, clocking in at over three hours. Seven of its ten tracks run past the 15-minute mark. The music itself also sounds exhausted, defined by drawn-out pads with only tiny sprinklings of melody or percussion to add any momentum or structure.
Take the opening cut, "The Dog With 1000 Faces." At over 26 minutes, it's the longest on the record, as dubby, twangy guitar is pulled to its breaking point over plaintive synth chords. There's the occasional sense of movement—plucked notes and fretboard brushes add a bit of percussion to the song's middle—but these are eventually lost to the endless, empty prairie. The first half of "Stepping Stone" is even sparser, moving at a painfully slow pace before the glass harmonica (played by Frahm's wife) enters the track to pull it from a morass of nothingness. Even this fades quickly, like trying to figure out if that streak really was a shooting star, or just a trick of the light.
The compositions on Music For Animals have an elongated, but loopy, song structure. It makes me think of another genre that requires patience, sometimes to the point of frustration: minimal techno. "Sheep In Black And White" is like an early Cocoon record stretched as far as it can go along the x-axis: the plonked bassline and wavering chords call to mind acts like Minilogue (who also, funny enough, have a fondness for animals). If you pitched the stuttering rhythm underneath the beautifully building (but ironically titled) "Briefly" up by, say, +30, you could imagine it being played at Sunwaves. I could even see a section of "Lemon Drop" being slipped into a David August or Max Cooper set.
Still, these are not club tracks, and the impulse might be to shrug off the extended runtime as artistic navel-gazing. But for Frahm, there's something almost political about the length. The album was written both as homage to Brian Eno's Music For albums, while also critiquing ambient music's appropriation via "the functional use of music these days, all these playlists with names like Music For Sleeping, Music For Focus, Music For Masturbation. Music always seems to need to do something useful." Music For Animals is anti-utility. Not a single song could conceivably belong on a mood-setting playlist. Instead, Frahm wants us to slow down and immerse ourselves in his world of droney ambiance. Still, the album is really long, and it's hard to deny that it's at least a little self-indulgent.
It's equally hard to deny the appeal of some of these tracks, which have the same emotional core as Frahm's most beloved, shorter compositions. On "Mussel Memory," electronic tide pools ripple with life as curious synth notes extend their tentacles. The pulsing "World of Squares" lulls you into a sense of complacency with its back-and-forth pulse. It's like listening to the sea, before the strings slip in and out of tune like crashing waves. The beauty that emerges throughout the record requires patience to be appreciated in full and—to Frahm's credit—when it arrives, it's worth the wait.
Tracklist01. THE DOG WITH 1000 FACES
02. MUSSEL MEMORY
03. SEAGULL SCENE
04. SHEEP IN BLACK AND WHITE
05. STEPPING STONE
06. BRIEFLY
07. RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT
08. WORLD OF SQUARES
09. LEMON DAY
10. DO DREAM