I’m at the Nils Frahm concert in Melbourne.
The show’s not yet started. I got here early and now watch the audience file in. Most are thirty or forty something – meticulously dishevelled.
Many seats fill with white guys who sit alone. I fit right in.
People snap photos of the sound rig on stage, a labyrinth of new and vintage gear, of crates and wires – it’s steam punk meets electronica.
Nils trots out – unannounced – and sits in front of a child-sized keyboard. He wiggles his fingers and begins to play. The audience falls silent except for the occasional crush of a plastic cup.
It’s more of a concert than a show. There’s not much to see, no laser display, no strobe lights, no inflatable puppets unfurl from the rafters. People listen from their seats. No one stands, or dances, or calls out. It’s unsociable music without being anti-social. Anti-social music is often social. This music is passive and personal, and I’m grateful to share it with the two thousand other people there with me in the dark.
Nils stands. He pirouettes around his command station of pianos, synthesizers and reverb units, pushing buttons and twisting knobs as if solo launching the Apollo moon landing. He’s working up a sweat.
He now plays a dismantled grand piano. His hands, side by side, dance on the keys like Muppet spiders. I'm near enough to hear the clunk of piano hammers return to neutral.
Nils layers his track. The music builds from a single note, suspended indefinitely, to an ocean of sound. Every note imaginable now pulses at once. My brain lights up. My heart thumps to the base. It seems possible, probable, that outside, every light in the world now blinks in unison.
The music gradually reveals a secret.
Whatever it is, the secret disintegrates the moment I'm aware of grasping it, buckles under the weight of my self-awareness. The secret's fractured pieces now dissipate to reveal themselves to someone worthier, someone whose more liquid consciousness can absorb and reassemble whatever Truth the joined pieces disclose.
I glimpsed only the secret's fragments. Even they were beautiful.
Frahm’s music is the soundtrack of a film made just for me. And I know every person in Hamer Hall feels it’s their movie too.
People don’t speak much as they leave the theatre. What is there really to say. People disperse into the night, no longer an audience.
I must go out more often.
– Yannick