Concert review | Only toilet brushes were missing from the long-awaited solo concert

Nils Frahm at Kulttuuritalo on Tuesday 8 October.

Recordings based on German Nils Frahmin the photos he took would probably have clear shapes and empty spaces and distant clouds – if he were his father Klaus Frahm professional photographer specializing in landscape architecture.

But of course, the same visual preferences can also be framed like this, as a successful musician touring the world alone. Nils Frahm (b. 1982), who grew up in Hamburg and settled in Berlin, is a pianist, keyboard player and composer specializing in minimalist instrumental music, whose first long-awaited concert in Finland drew Kulttuuritalo to almost full capacity.

Backgrounds without knowing Kulttuuritalo’s setting, you could have expected more maximal music, because there were only pianos, synthesizers and organs for at least ten different pairs of hands on the stage. The rarest of all these keyboards was the white Mellotron, a kind of sampler precursor developed sixty years ago.

It wasn’t a stage prop, or anything. Frahm actually spent part of the time between different instruments, always wiping his sweat from time to time. The almost two-hour non-stop and almost non-interrupting solo concert was clearly also a bodily performance, even though the electroacoustic and melodic music based on small variations was disembodied most of the time.

An excellent introduction to this “spirited” mood was the fragile-sounding glass accordion played by Frahm at the beginning, which was guaranteed to attract attention even as an object on the dark stage. It’s a cylindrical instrument made of transparent glass, which, now lit from behind, resembled a kebab skewer on its lap, spinning furiously. That’s about the lack of meat.

Twenty Frahm, who has released a solo record since 2005, performed songs from almost his entire career, and at the beginning, until now, in a bigger way. Four vinyl records Music For Animals (2022) lasts a little over three hours and challenges – or tests – the attention span, especially with its longest track of almost half an hour, ironically named BrieflyIn short.

However, the long live version of the Kultuuritalo was not a perfect version, because now the audience could also participate on request – by vocalizing like wild animals.

The mood didn’t really get any wilder than this, but it was heard towards the end More made the audience demand even more – and that’s what I got. The last song we heard was ten years old, the name of which could have broken the cultural spell if you had known it.

It was Toilet Brushesin whose performances Frahm has often used real toilet brushes as props. Now they were nowhere to be seen—perhaps only because there was no grand piano on the stage now for him to brush the strings of.