Nils Frahm

“These are changing times: sad times but times that are also filled with hope. And I felt like this changing world required a different position from me, another way of relating to it. Working on this album helped me in the process.
I was searching for connections: with myself, with others and with something bigger than all of us. Soon I realised that writing an album in solitude – like I usually work – started to feel hypocritical, and that playing shows at venues with great PA systems and the perfect sound and lights couldn’t feel more different from how I normally write my music.

Nathan Shubert has been a fixture in the local music scene for years, working in bands as a side player for popular artists like No Sinner, David Newberry, and Jody Glenham, but the Vancouver-based pianist is now poised to take centre stage himself with a debut solo album of modern classical music for piano.

Initially founded by German-born Robert Raths in 2007, the London-based label has grown and extended across the world with satellite offices in Los Angeles and Berlin. Spanning over ten years, Erased Tapes has nurtured avant-garde artists from all around the world whilst remaining genre-defying and truly independent.

While plaudits for LTO have tended to focus their praise on No Pasa Nada’s tense and eerie programming, its deep sonics and waves of static, Storybook gives us access to the beating heart within the machine. It is an album not purely of mechanics, but also of human warmth, formed with a colour palette of equal digital and organic materials. There is expression and articulation, delicateness of performance, voices both natural and treated, piano and brass, all deftly placed about a canvas of electronic fabrics…