JUDGE NILS FRAHM MUSICIAN

‘We are in the midst of inventing an instrument, which I would like to call the “ventiphone”. It’s based on fans humming in a pitched fashion’

- EMILY MCDERMOTT

Nils Frahm comes bursting through the door of the retro-style café where we’ve agreed to meet: ‘I’m here to pick you up,’ the musician, producer and composer says, slightly out of breath. We emerge into a pitch-black wintry Berlin evening, walk briskly down the street, and turn a corner. A dim, warm light emanates from behind a wall of large windows. One is open and Frahm promptly climbs through, beckoning me to follow. He pulls it closed, latches the metal frame in place, and makes a comment about how the window-as-entrance saved us a significant amount of time in the cold. As we walk through a thick wooden doorway towards the source of light, what unfolds is something from a musician’s dream: an eclectic array of instruments – some recognisable, others completely foreign – fill a 140 sq m room with towering ceilings. The walls are covered in fleur-de-lis motifs, some painted in gold, others carved into wood. Next door is a small kitchen and two control rooms, one of which is equipped with a custom-made console.

This musical paradise is Frahm’s studio, otherwise known as Studio 3 in Block B of Berlin’s legendary Funkhaus, a former GDR radio station complex, now a protected cultural site, built by acclaimed Bauhaus architect Franz Ehrlich in the early 1950s. Frahm, who is renowned for music that defies genre labels, falling somewhere between neoclassical, electronic and ambient, has produced his music at Funkhaus since 2016. (Previously, he rented spaces for short periods of time, the longest of which was a ten-day stint when he wrote and recorded the soundtrack for the critically acclaimed German film Victoria.) But beyond developing his creative practice at Funkhaus, Frahm is also here to restore the original architecture.