Nils Frahm at NCH review: German classical ambient wizard blasts into orbit right from the start

Nils Frahm

National Concert Hall

★★★★☆

Nils Frahm apologises early in his scintillating National Concert Hall set for not having played Ireland in six years. But it’s hard to blame him for staying away, considering the sheer size of the rig he’s lugged to Dublin. Arranged around the Berlin-based neoclassical composer are analogue synths, upright piano, samplers, sequencers and various auxiliary crates and cabinets that, amid the dry ice and gloomy yellow lighting, look like a scrum of old-school Doctor Who Daleks. Unless he’s taking a private jet, airport check-in must be a trial.

All that (presumed) effort proves worth it, however. Chatty between songs, when he sits down to play, Frahm is an avant-garde wizard. He begins with a haunting drone piece summoned with gloved hands and a glass harmonica – an instrument played by rubbing glass bowls and which builds to an eerie cacophony between a wail and a whale song.

Frahm grew up near Hamburg and has spent much of his musical life in Berlin, operating out of his bespoke “Saal 3″ recording space in the Funkhaus studio complex – a 1950s building overlooking the River Spree which previously housed the old East Germany broadcasting HQ. Having studied piano with Nahum Brodsky, “the protégé of the protégé” of Tchaikovsky, he is at the forefront of the “classical ambient” genre, which fuses orchestral music and electronica.

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He is a superstar of his field. Frahm’s commercial breakthrough was in 2018 with the album All Melody – a UK top 30 hit praised by the dance website Resident Advisor for its pedal-to-the-floor eclecticism (“It’s not a techno album, it’s not a classical album and it’s not an ambient album, but it at times resembles all three”.)

Live, his music often can have a dystopian quality: walls of weeping synths evoking Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack and often followed by an explosive dance-beat. But it isn’t all doom and boom. He’s terrifically matey and, on the first of two Dublin dates, jokes with the audience about the terrible disruption in space-time that has taken place when England won on penalties in the Euro 2024 tournament just before he goes on stage.

There is improvisation, too: at one point, he invites the crowd to pitch in with their finest animal sounds, and inevitably, everyone impersonates a monkey or an elephant. He loops the chorus of hoots and whoops, weaving the noise into a horror show mash-up between Aphex Twin and Philip Glass.

Frahm goes for broke in the final 30 minutes of the two-hour set, blending techno-flavoured piano with flashing lights. Such is the intensity you almost expect the equipment to reconfigure itself as a rocket and blaze through the ceiling. While that doesn’t happen, this is nonetheless a breathtaking performance that blasts into high orbit at the outset and remains in interstellar overdrive throughout.