Spaces
Started: 2023-04-30 20:04:10
Submitted: 2023-04-30 22:34:10
Visibility: World-readable
Seeing Nils Frahm perform at the Fox Theater in Oakland
I first heard the music of Nils Frahm while climbing Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado in 2012. I had a long playlist of podcasts to keep me occupied on the long hike, including an episode of All Songs Considered with the song "Familiar" from his then-recent album Felt. When I heard the song through my earbuds, walking on the top of the world above 13,000 feet on Holy Cross Ridge, I was spellbound. On the recording we hear the inner workings of the piano, amplified to provide the percussion on the track: the thump of the keys and the scrape of the mechanism that works the hammers, the musician's labored breathing as he plays the haunting melody, and the static of the room itself. This is music that is defined by its imperfections; it wants the recording itself to be a visceral artifact of a real physical thing.
Now I want you to go listen to the song "Familiar" from the album Felt, and maybe you'll hear some of what I heard on the mountain a decade ago.
Nils Frahm played at the Fox Theater in Oakland on Friday night, the 28th of April. Oakland is on the other side of the mountain and across the bay from me, but it's close enough for artists I want to see, and Nils Frahm made the cut.
I took a somewhat-circuitous route to Oakland for the Friday evening show. As I drove up I-280, past Colma into Daly City, the fog blew over the ridge in waves, looking like a time-lapse shot of clouds moving except that it was happening in real time. By the time I reached the BART station and parked the the garage the fog was thick, hugging the ground in a cool mist and condensing on my windshield.
I rode BART inbound to Embarcadero, then emerged above ground to find that the fog was trapped on the west side of the city; Market Street was still bright and sunny. I found the line to wait for the 17:25 ferry to Oakland (at Gate G, which had been under construction when I worked in Soma five years ago), then boarded the ferry when it arrived.
I lingered at the back of the boat as the ferry departed from the Ferry Building. The second deck had some open-air seating in the back, but the best view was from the lower deck. There was a large bike rack in the middle of the deck, plus plenty of space to stand at the railing and admire the scenery as we sped under the Bay Bridge, with the late afternoon sun silhouetting the city skyline. Sutro Tower was sticking up above the fog pouring over the city, an I could just barely make out a plane climbing out of SFO (visible in the picture here only as a speck on the pale blue of the sky above the fog).
In Oakland I ate at Souley Vegan, a restaurant advertising vegan soul food, a couple of blocks from Jack London Square. I ate fried okra bites with a creamy dipping sauce (which were good, but the "starter" size could have fed four people) and a seitan fried steak, topped with fried onions, with mashed potatoes. The food was good, and it was interesting to sample a cuisine that's usually inaccessible to me as a vegetarian.
I arrived at the Fox Theater in time to stand close to the stage; there were only a couple of rows of people between me and the stage. This gave me a good view of the musical equipment set up on stage, but I had trouble recognizing most of it. There were multiple keyboards, which (once the artist began his set, I could approximately match the keyboards to sounds) corresponded to organs of various descriptions, plus a piano.
When Nils Frahm took the stage to begin his performance, he started at the weirdest instrument on the stage: a set of singing bowls, mounted in on a spinning lathe that kind of reminded me of a horizontal gyro meat skewer. He wore gloves that had been dipped in water so he could get the right sound out of the bowls, and as he played them they created a spooky haunted sound that he wove into a coherent melody, then moved on to the organ keyboard under the spinning bowls and eventually other instruments on the stage. The first song took something like half an hour, a long meandering melody played with different keyboards at different times.
For the second song, Nils asked the audience to provide a sample he could use. He asked the left half of the audience to sing a high A note, then admonished them to sing in the correct octave. I was in the right half of the audience; he asked us to make a "contented" sound, like "jungle animals" or something, and seemed pleased with what we came up with. He sampled the room, then applied "studio magic" to adjust the quality of the sound, then used it as the drone behind the melody he played on stage.
I didn't recognize the songs he played during his set; I wasn't sure if they were specific compositions from some of his many albums (not all of which I've listened to in detail), or improvisations on stage. Most of the songs used a sequencer in the background; he'd adjust the knobs on the sequencer or the filters around him to change the music in real time, and play one or more keyboards with the song's main melodies.
I recognized the first song of the encore, "Says", from the album I listened to most during the pandemic, Spaces, from 2013. I discovered the album in the winter of 2021, while I was living at the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains. My pandemic pod was my household — my family plus our au pair Sharon. We were working from home, safe from the pandemic, but profoundly isolated from the rest of the world. From the deck I could see Santa Cruz far below (at least, when the clouds cooperated); I could see for miles but I couldn't go anywhere. All of the land around was privately owned by someone else and festooned with "no trespassing" signs. Going out for groceries or coffee was a major expedition.
It meant a lot to me (and maybe no one else in the theater) to listen to that specific song, so indelibly associated with the isolation and interruption of the pandemic — in a theater crowded with other people, all there to listen to and love the same music. This was one of the experiences I missed most in the pandemic, and at that moment I felt the contrast and how far we've come.
And then the concert was over and Nils left the stage and the house lights came up. I joined the crowd shuffling out from the floor of the theater onto the streets of downtown Oakland and into the BART station at 19th Street. I rode BART under the bay to Daly City, still shrouded in fog, now lit up and glowing from the street lights, then drove the rest of the way home.
