I almost felt like a voyeur.

We were sat in complete darkness watching Nils Frahm, with his back to the audience, scurry around his behemoth custom setup as if it was just him and his tools in the room and not with the nearly 2000 people watching in awe.

With one small spotlight from behind his equipment illuminating a portion of the stage, it created an unintelligible, gold-lined, silhouette of Nils. It also shined directly into the Golden Kebab (which apparently is actually called a Glass Harmonica, see below, but now I know you won’t be able to see anything other than a kebab - sorry) transforming the spotlight into a radiating glow as he started creating this eerie, hair raising sound from it. An imperfect, haunting, tone and such a curious introduction to the show.

Glass Harmonica with all the toppings please

This homed-in on intimacy continued for minutes until you finally felt your shoulders relax and realise you’ve been completely engrossed. And while the smaller instruments commenced the show, there was a small part of your attention on the possibilities of the monstrous synthesizers to the right of him.

As he raised his final finger from the Glass Harmonica and let it ring out with extended reverberation and delay, it was the heavy hitter’s time to shine. A hunched skip across to the synthesizers opened up the show to new realms.

More lights accompanied him on this side. Picking up the pace and becoming more electronic. He managed the controls with the same intensity as a spaceship captain who’s just lost two engines, his crew, and is fighting to avoid being pulled into a black hole. Twists, turns, reaches, lunges.

But somehow these actions sculpted the vast, rhythmic, soundscape of thought-provoking sonic ascensions that almost had you holding onto your seat with his track, Says.

For a show with no lyrics, it painted one of the most irrefutable stories I’ve ever seen performed live. I believe this was nestled in amongst the rumbles of the square waves and the floating of the echoed piano.

It brought time to the surface.

The long arpeggiated synthesizers that were the foundations of his stories became a representation of things passing. The intermittent lights from around the stage cast titanic shadows on the walls of Nils and his equipment at work, building this sense of circular movement, with him stuck in one place in the middle of this simulation zoetrope.

It had the power to resurface emotions. The same way water does in a simmering pot. It moves to the top level and slowly evaporates over time, leaving a delicious-looking dahl. That’s what it’s like. It gives this slightly bubbling feeling of overwhelm and time to reflect in a manageable way that you can evaporate off slowly.

The carving and sculpting was for him, the end results were for the audience’s reflection.

That’s why he had his back to us.

So you can be wherever you want to be. 

And just as fast as he creates these whirlwinds of sounds that cast you into the air, he suddenly drops you back into the room with his more notable tracks like Re, if you listen to him on Spotify.

It’s as though his more sporadic, booming, raw, arrangements were the sounds of his inner workings as he molded the much gentler piano pieces.

After the pinnacle, the number of lights began to fade. 

Until we were left with just one single spotlight again.

But the beauty of this now is that, unlike the silence that accompanied the first spotlight, this was opposed by a thunderous standing ovation.

Life’s work.