Accomplished composer, producer and celebrated performer Nils Frahm announces his new album, Old Friends New Friends, out December 3rd on Leiter, and shares lead single “All Numbers End” that can be heard below. This collection gathers together 23 solo piano tracks recorded between 2009 and 2021, almost all hitherto unreleased but omitted from previous albums and projects for one reason or another. The album offers “an anatomy of all my ways of thinking musically and playing,” Frahm says, adding with a smile, “Maybe I could say it’s an album I worked on for twelve years, and finally I have enough material?”
Old Friends New Friends was pieced together during the pandemic as Frahm used the time to arrange his archives, conscious of the sheer number of recordings he’d accumulated. Having selected his favorites, he realised how, when he listened to them together, they offered “a different spectrum of freedom for me. I forgot that some tracks are ten years old, some two, and they’re all played on different pianos. Instead, I remembered how, as a fan, I love albums like this. With a lot of my records, there’s a point where you feel, ‘This is the centerpiece,’ but here I wasn’t really worrying about that. It still feels like my universe, though, and I’m proud that all these things which I never found a way to unite before now work together. It’s like I tossed flowers indiscriminately into a vase and then realised it looked exactly right.”
OLD FRIENDS NEW FRIENDS TRACKLIST
1. 4:33 (A Tribute to John Cage)
2. Late
3. Berduxa
4. Rain Take
5. Todo Nada
6. Weddinger Walzer
7. In The Making
8. Further In The Making
9. All Numbers End
10. The Idea Machine
11. Then Patterns
12. Corn
13. New Friend
14. Nils Has A New Piano
15. Acting
16. As A Reminder
17. Iced Wood
18. Strickleiter
19. The Chords
20. The Chords (Broken Down)
21. Forgetmenot
22. Restive
23. Old Friend
