Trance Frendz - An Evening With Ólafur Arnalds And Nils Frahm

On July 28, 2015, Arnalds visited Nils Frahm at Durton Studio in Berlin. The original plan was to film a short promotional clip for their Collaborative Works compilation. Instead of playing old material, they started improvising and never stopped. Between 8pm and 4am — eight hours, no overdubs, no edits — seven new pieces emerged. Alexander Schneider filmed the session, producing a 45-minute documentary alongside the album. Each track is titled by the time it was recorded: 20:17, 21:05, 23:17. A diary written in real time.

Frahm studied classical piano under Nahum Brodsky, a student of a student of Tchaikovsky — a direct pedagogical line back to the Russian Romantic tradition. His father Klaus designed covers for ECM Records, giving him early exposure to the label that defined a certain austere, spacious aesthetic in jazz and classical music. Rather than pursue an orchestral career, Frahm moved to Berlin in 2006 as a studio technician. His breakthrough came with Felt (2011), made by placing felt on the piano hammers — a physical intervention that defined his signature muffled, intimate sound.

His current studio is Saal 3 at Funkhaus Berlin, a former East German state broadcasting complex. He spent years rebuilding the room from the cabling up, assembling a custom mixing desk from Neumann faders and filling the space with Moog Taurus synths, a Roland Juno-60, a Mellotron, and a pipe organ he built from scratch — all alongside grand pianos. The fact that a chamber music recording room now contains this equipment says something about the post-classical project in miniature. This is the fifth Arnalds-Frahm collaboration, and the pattern is always the same: two friends in a room with instruments, usually in Berlin, with minimal planning. Frahm’s description is the clearest: “Everything that we put out is basically just a byproduct of us spending time together.”