Tripping with Nils Frahm

There are a handful of reasons I never recommend concert films to anyone, and the first is that many of them are very bad. Humanity is a close quarters species, we don’t do well with separation, and the distance between musician and immediate audience is already hard enough ground to cover without the added canyon of directorial intent and lens selection. It’s difficult for an artist to be presented as they are by another artist. At best, we leave our fingerprints on everything and at worst, we forget that we are the radio and not the song. Or at least that often seems to be the case with many concert jaunts.

The only recent exception I can think of at the moment is Tripping with Nils Frahm. I spent some time with it recently as I was tracing a few threads of my life back to the night I saw him live in London at the Roundhouse back in 2015. At the time I felt then like I was standing on the edge of an abyss, and looking back on it I suppose I was right. I would go back to that night, and the albums of of his that fed into it, so many times over the next few years when it felt like the center could not hold any longer. There is something titanic and world-shifting about the way he plays his pianos (some of which he built himself), almost like watching Keith Jarrett composing the hydrogen bomb, and the magnitude of it made me feel safe.

Lately I’ve been starting to sense another edge on its way, and it gave me a great deal of comfort watching something like this from someone who has already gone over it. Maybe we don’t have many concert films like this because there are so few artists like Nils. Or maybe Benoit Toulemonde did a particularly excellent job of staying out of frame. Either way, you can stream it on Mubi with a free weeklong trial and I strongly suggest you give it a bit your time today.