Nonkeen

Mixing his classical piano skills with a love of his father's Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver jazz records and the experimental, electronic artists like Roni Size and Aphex Twin that he discovered in his teenage years, Nils Frahm has earned a reputation as one of Germany's most innovative young composer/producers thanks to acclaimed solo albums Felt and Spaces. His first attempts at musical stardom didn't fare as well though. Alongside school mates Frederick Gmeiner and Sebastian Singwald, Frahm first started making recordings on cassette tapes in the 1990s and the trio spent their summer holiday performing at a fairground when they were 15-years-old. The group came to an end when seats from a carousel broke off and came smashing down into their equipment midway through a set, with the lads vowing not to play together again. That changed in 2007 when they met up for a reunion, and began working out of Singwald's basement studio in Berlin and - using the original tapes as a guide - played freeform, electro-jazz jams into cheap microphones and lo-fi tape decks. Calling themselves Nonkeen, it took them years to settle on the sound that they wanted, but 2016's debut album The Gamble turned into an ambient, swelling piece that warped primitive drum and bass beats with jazz shuffles, nocturnal atmospherics and glacial Sigur Ros twinkles. Later that year they released more material from the session titled Oddments Of The Gamble and toured across Europe for the first time.

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