It’s another slow start to the week, and when days eke by like this I need songs that settle the noise in my head — noise that comes from restlessness. This is when I need music from Nils Frahm or Brian Eno, or maybe something that combines the two, like Frahm’s latest (very long) track, “Lemon Day.”
I guess I’m lucky Nils Frahm is releasing his newest album soon (September 23), called Music for Animals. The last we heard from the German musician were reissues of older work, compiled on three releases of remastered albums: Electric Piano, Streichelfisch, and Durton. And before that some live stuff!
Now, Frahm is digging into the past again; not with his previous work, but with something like Brian Eno’s seminal Ambient 1: Music for Airports. If you’ve never heard it, then I encourage you to listen and follow up with the sequel, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror.
While you’re at it, listen to the entire Ambient series: four albums Brian Eno and musicians like Harold Budd and Laraaji recorded from the late ’70s through the mid-’80s. The first album in the series, more or less, coined the term “ambient,” and although Brian Eno had made similar music before, Music for Airports was basically when the genre made it to the mainstream.
Four decades later, this music sounds just as good — or better — as when it was first recorded, having been conceived as “sound installations.” Almost like paintings of sound whose airwaves hang in the background. It’s music that’s good enough to be heard deliberately, and yet doesn’t demand our attention.
That tradition is alive and well in the latest single from Music for Animals, “Lemon Day.” Nils Frahm compares the album to a waterfall or leaves on a stormy tree. These need neither development nor a break in flow. They’re just there, and we can stare or not. The water falls; the leaves rustle; both invite us.
There are two singles from the album out so far, the other being “Right Right Right.” It’s shaping up to be a good successor to Music for Airports and the ambient genre, overall. I’ll always welcome a modern entry into the catalogue! Pop music is raucous and fun, a bubbly good time. But every now and then, I need to stare at a wall — or a flat highway that rolls on and on in a loop. That’s what “Lemon Day,” and, hopefully, the rest of Frahm’s Music for Animals is for.