Staff Reviews

Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm - Collaborative Works

Review by Chris Shipman

What it lacks in structural polish, it makes up for in quality»

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Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm announce Double-CD release 'Collaborative Works' - comprising all three vinyl EPs 'Loon', 'Stare' and 'Life Story Love And Glory' as well as 7 new songs from their 'Trance Frendz' studio film. "The music on this CD is a collection of our studio collaborations from recent years. We would meet in Reykjavik or Berlin with the intention to share some days off work, hiking, swimming or eating pizza. That is great for a couple days, but after a while we would always end up back in the studio, fiddling with synths or pianos. This collection of recordings cannot be an album. It will remain a collage of our studio experiments of the past. It simply is convenient to have them all together here, so you don't need to look out for some limited 10" somewhere or deal with a nerdy record dealer in Japan to track down this one 7 ̋ which will turn out to sound pretty rough anyways... consider them as moments in space and time where we shared the same room for some days to come down and enjoy making music. After deciding to release the studio collaborations, we planned to do a video session of us performing an improvised duet to promote the release. On the 28th of July 2015 we met up at Durton Studio in Berlin and invited Alexander Schneider and his camera to document it. But instead of ending the session after the first take we continued improvising throughout the night, ending up with several new pieces written and recorded in 8 hours with no overdubs and no edits. We felt there was something special in these songs as they arrived so quickly and unexpectedly, remembering that our friendship and collaboration originally started with live improvisation on stage. At the end of the night we had all this music that sounded unfamiliar even to us, loudly asking to be included in this collection." (​Olafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm).
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