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"Collecting 12 years of solo piano recordings, the Berlin composer explores some of his quietest, most intimate material yet, in which the creaking of the pedal is often as audible as the notes." - Pitchfork Nils Frahm’s double album Old Friends New Friends gathers together 23 solo piano tracks recorded between 2009 and 2021, almost all hitherto unreleased but, for one reason or another, omitted from previous projects. The album offers “an anatomy of all my ways of thinking musically and playing,” Frahm says, adding with a smile, “Maybe I could say it’s an album I worked on for twelve years, and finally I have enough material?” Old Friends New Friends was pieced together during the pandemic as Frahm used the time to arrange his archives, conscious of the sheer number of recordings he’d accumulated. Having selected his favourites, he realised how, when he listened to them together, they offered “a different spectrum of freedom for me. I forgot that some tracks are ten years old, some two, and they’re all played on different pianos. Instead I remembered how, as a fan, I love albums like this. With a lot of my records there’s a point where you feel, ‘This is the centrepiece,’ but here I wasn’t really worrying about that. It still feels like my universe, though, and I’m proud that all these things which I never found a way to unite before now work together. It’s like I tossed flowers indiscriminately into a vase and then realised it looked exactly right.”