FRAHM, NILS - MUSIC FOR ANIMALS (4LP)

4LP vinyl housed in a single-pocket cardboard jacket, with black poly lined inner sleeves. "Nils Frahm returns with an expansive new album, 'Music For Animals', his first fresh studio material since 2018's 'All Melody' and 2019's associated 'All Encores', and his first full length album of brand-new music for LEITER. Containing ten tracks and clocking in at over three hours long, it's an ambitious and compelling set different to anything Frahm's released to date - in fact, it finds the Piano Day founder declining to use a piano - but at the same time retains many of the qualities that have set the influential musician's work apart over much of the last two decades. Unfolding at an unhurried, meditative pace in a celebration of tone, timbre and texture - and thus of sound itself - 'Music For Animals' offers an unusually immersive experience. Nonetheless, it also functions as what Erik Satie once called 'Furniture Music,' inviting a listener to wander in and out at their leisure. "My constant inspiration," Frahm explains, "was something as mesmerising as watching a great waterfall or the leaves on a tree in a storm. It's good we have symphonies and music where there's a development, but a waterfall doesn't need an Act 1, 2, 3, then an outcome, and nor do the leaves on a tree in a storm. Some people like watching the leaves rustle and the branches move. This record is for them"." (label info)