About

Nils Frahm has always said that he’s just waiting for something real special when being asked if he would ever score the music for a film. And that’s exactly what German director Sebastian Schipper presented to him with his one-take feature Victoria. Filmed in Berlin, Victoria’s plot sees a runaway party girl, who's asked by three friendly men to join them as they hit the town, but their wild night of partying suddenly turns into a bank robbery as the music changes from techno to subdued piano sounds.

For the recording session at Studio P4 in Berlin, Frahm enlisted the help of long-time collaborator and cellist Anne Müller, violist Viktor Orri Árnason and ambient artist Erik K. Skodvin of Deaf Center on guitar.

Dear viewer and listener,

I’ve finally written music for a film. It took me some time to do so, as I was patiently waiting for a movie that would truly speak to me. When director Sebastian Schipper invited me to work on Victoria, I knew it was worth the long wait. Does such a strong film even need music? I realised it wouldn’t be easy to create a score that embraces these bold pictures.

Luckily we were given unusual creative freedom by approaching the movie together with Sebastian Schipper, who was keeping the production and direction to one single team. The score was recorded in a special location, the former GDR broadcasting production facilities that today host Studio P4. We simply put a big screen in the middle of the room, filled it with microphones and instruments, set the movie on loop and kept improvising on top of it together – my good friends and I.

The guest musicians started their recording session by playing a cohesive take over the course of the whole movie. This was the most interesting part of the day, since they hadn’t seen the film before. They became spectators and creators at once, intuitively recording hundreds of different cues that way. You are about to listen to some of its highlights. I hope they do Victoria and your ears justice.

With love, Nils Frahm – Erased Tapes

“You can soak in the long, receding tones like you would sit in the sun beneath a big window, or you can fixate on surgically tiny details, like the way you can nearly hear the felt of the piano hammers being brushed into individual fibers on "A Stolen Car", or the rustle of whatever foreign objects he’s placed on the strings to make them generate extra noises. Frahm strikes little "off" notes in the interstices of that piece's simple major chords, so that when they ring, they don’t ring "clean"—there is a tendril of sour air in them, seemingly acknowledging the turmoil that plays out on the screen.

Moments like this in Frahm’s score are furtive and quiet: There is a foreboding drone piece called "In the Parking Garage", full of room tone and tiny, human-sounding scrapes, that hits your ear the way a parking garage's sodium lighting assaults your eye…

Frahm's awareness seems repeatedly drawn to glowing spaces where notes ring out after they've been struck. These spaces mimic the way a memorable event lingers in our minds, acquiring new shades of meaning and slowly receding into the morass of our lived experience. In echo-rich, contemplative music like this, the event itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as its aftereffects, the way it changes over time and the way it changes you.” – Pitchfork

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