Some music is so personal and organic that it can’t really be quantified. Nonkeen’s first album, 2016’s The Gamble, was the result of three lifelong friends—keyboardist Nils Frahm, bassist Sepp Singwald, and drummer Frederic Gmeiner—snatching fragments of time in rehearsal spaces over the course of a near-decade to create a seamless, holistic album. The years spent making music together formed the band’s style: elements of ambient music and field recordings, washes of abstract sound, free improvisation, lounge music, and driving Can-esque grooves creating an alluring, enigmatic mood; music that’s definitely about something, but just what, exactly?
There is relatively more prominent storytelling on All good?, and it comes from the inspirational figure of Herbert Laser, a musician and instrument-maker who created a fusion of jazz, krautrock, and electronic music called “Laserjazz.” That distinctive sound is one way to describe Nonkeen, and the track titles on All good? parse an enigmatic sentence from an interview with Laser: “I am sure that love will never be a product of plasticity!”
After the dramatic opening fanfare of “I’m sure,” with its sample of Laser’s instrument the Synthar, on “that love” the album settles into a course of music about playing music. In the ongoing conversation that is Nonkeen, All good? speaks of the deep feelings that can come out of the phrases, chords, and rhythms the three put together. The album is relatively more conventional that way, songs without words, and the playing has marvelous beauty of enormous sophistication. Frahm’s electric piano sound is sensual—not just the rounded, shimmering tones of the instrument but his touch, which feels like it’s caressing each note, even when playing hard. If the tracks are fragments of a sentence, the album is a coherent whole, meaningful and beguiling.
