Day may come as a surprise to those who, over the last decade, have watched Frahm shift slowly away from the piano compositions with which he first made his name in favour of a nonetheless still-distinctive approach that’s considerably more instrumentally complex and intricately arranged. In addition, in 2021, having spent the early part of the pandemic arranging his archives, he released the 80 minute, 23-track Old Friends New Friends, a compilation of previously unreleased piano music intended to enable him to ”start over” with a clean slate. Judging from the extended, ambient nature of Music For Animals, it proved a successful gambit, but Frahm has never been able to resist returning to his first love, and those who enjoyed earlier acclaimed albums like The Bells, Felt and Screws will once again revel in Day’s familiar, personal style.

Nils Frahm returns with an expansive new album, Music For Animals, his first fresh studio material since 2018’s All Melody and 2019’s associated All Encores. Containing ten tracks and clocking in at over three hours long, it’s an ambitious and compelling set different to anything Frahm’s released to date – in fact, it finds the Piano Day founder declining to use a piano – but at the same time retains many of the qualities that have set the influential musician’s work apart over much of the last two decades.

Nils Frahm releases a new double album, Old Friends New Friends, released by Leiter, the label he set up with his manager, Felix Grimm. The collection gathers together 23 solo piano tracks recorded between 2009 and 2021, almost all hitherto unreleased but, for one reason or another, omitted from previous albums and projects. Neither quite a new LP nor exactly a compilation, it 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?”

Released on March 29, 2021, on the occasion of Piano Day 2021, for the first time on the Erased Tapes label, Graz is the new album by the German pianist-composer Nils Frahm, recorded in 2009, in Mumuth, at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, and never previously released. Sometimes when you listen to a piano, you may think it is a conversation between a woman and a man. At the same time, it can suggest the shapes of the universe and describe the appearance of a black hole. You can create sounds that have no relation to anything we can measure.

A legendary artist at a legendary location: Tripping with Nils Frahm captures one of the world’s most sought-after live acts performing at one of Berlin’s most iconic buildings.

To mark this year’s 88th day and as an acknowledgement to these unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in, Piano Day founder, pianist and producer Nils Frahm releases a collection of eight solo piano pieces titled Empty out now.