Nils Frahm and F.S.Blumm share their fifth collaborative album, ‘Handling’. Containing three tracks but 40 minutes long, it finds the duo advancing from 2021’s dub-influenced ‘2X1=4’, deploying its lessons in ambitious new territory that also nods to earlier collections. “Making music with Frank is always worthwhile,” says Frahm, who’s just completed over three years of touring 2022’s ‘Music For Animals’, “because it’s so much fun to work on something so unique.” Recorded at LEITER’s studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album is out on vinyl and via all digital platforms.

If Frahm described ‘2X1=4’ as “only as much of a dub record as the ones before are jazz,” Blumm, a revered mainstay of Germany’s underground for a quarter of a century, considers ‘Handling’ more akin to a field recording. He compares it to animals scuttling through a forest at sunrise, encountering a miniature chamber orchestra tucked away among the trees. “They’re playing little instruments, but just one note at a time. There’s one note here, the next person plays another, then someone plays one more, before two minutes later the first person comes back and plays two. It’s a society that doesn’t exist, with little characters rushing around, running and hiding.”

To some this may sound whimsical, but it’s unusually apposite, distantly echoing Mark Hollis’ late-period aesthetic: “Silence is above everything.” As a touchstone, however, the duo prefers the lingering shadow of Luc Ferrari’s late 1960s ‘Presque Rien’, famed for its musique concrète and innovative use of stereo. Either way, ‘Handling’’s three pieces are exquisitely detailed and constantly surprising, its language Blumm and Frahm’s own. Their scrupulous arrangements exploit a magic cabinet of instruments, among them pianos, celestas and cristal bachets, glockenspiels, guitars and multiple forms of percussion. “When we wrote ‘metal bowl’ in the credits,” Frahm smiles, “Frank probably used fifteen!”

Afterwards, their painstakingly engineered improvisations were equally meticulously reassembled in a series of intense editing sessions that they liken to diving into a tunnel. “I really lost myself,” Blumm, who also provides the album’s front cover image, recalls. “I didn’t know where I was anymore. Then you step back, just as I do when I’m painting, and you suddenly understand, ‘Oh, there’s something much bigger here.’ In this case, I could barely even understand it was me, or us, that we did this. Maybe it sounds a bit vain, but I was really moved. Like, ‘Wow! What’s this?’”

It’s notable that ‘Handling’’s three pieces are each entitled ‘Leuchter’. The German for ‘candlestick’, it helps encapsulate both the LP’s luminescent glow and the rising inner energy that collaboration can spark. Nonetheless, the word can also mean ‘chandelier’, an object made up of countless smaller elements, each pendalogue catching the light, affecting its frequency, and sending out infinite signals of its own. Not that they left their exploratory exploits entirely up to chance. Blumm brought what he calls ‘collages’ “so that we had a base to reflect on,” his selection including edited noises from instruments like kalimbas and musical boxes. They’d also regularly discuss their intentions and ideas over a bottle of red wine, though they never made plans for an end result. “We always enjoy good conversation,” Blumm says. “I throw in a thought, a feeling, and, whether it’s clear or just rough, it’s always inspiring what comes back from Nils.”

Significantly, these weren’t the only crucial conversations, with their interactions with Frahm’s famous studio considered in much the same terms. Blumm, who considers it the best space in Berlin, had already recorded there a quarter century earlier, and both musicians have always appreciated its considerable size and exceptional acoustics. “It’s another sparring partner,” Blumm argues. “The microphones, the distance to the microphones… You can create an inner room, one where the notes resonate and you are resonating with the room.”

That their collaboration is built on a friendship and mutual admiration dating back to the early 2000s enables an unusual level of trust. “We’re both prime movers for this creative momentum,” Blumm states. It’s significant, too, that both are known to operate in their own distinct manner. “I have this chaotic artistic approach,” he adds, “and, in a way, Nils puts things in a straight line. But he puts them in at unexpectedly strange angles, things you didn’t even realise existed, and somehow, in the end, it’s balanced.”

What emerges – combining the language, poetry and communication of their first records with their last’s studio experimentation – captures the essence of what always makes Blumm and Frahm’s music so idiosyncratic. “Somehow, we’ve created these genres for ourselves, and now we’ve combined them. We’re quoting ourselves, but creating something fresh. It’s us, but as lots of particles, out of which we’ve created another version. It’s not Frank, it’s not Nils. We’ve become a new persona.” And, as such, it’s really not important who said this, because ‘Handling’ speaks for itself.