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Late Night Prom with BBC Radio 6 Music

Mary Anne Hobbs

Presenter, BBC Radio 6Music

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Nils Frahm

On Wednesday (5 August), the Royal Albert Hall will play host to a late night performance. Prom 27: Late Night... with BBC Radio 6 Music will feature German musician, composer and producer Nils Frahm and his Erased Tapes Record labelmates, the American duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Here, curator/presenter of Prom 27, Mary Anne Hobbs explains how the production came about, and what to expect from the performance.

Prom 27 has been 11 months in the making. I first met Nils Frahm (pictured top) in Manchester last September to talk about the project. It felt like a wild and elusive dream, but we shared so much belief in the idea that we could bring a truly ground breaking performance to the Proms.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen

The first tune of Nils’ that I played on the radio was You, a very simple, intimate piano piece. I then talked with his record label about new material, and was given a world exclusive preview of Says, (my Track of the Year in 2013). Says is a piece of music with magical properties: it feels like Nils has taken the complex textures of what love could be and transposed them into sound and it resonated with a huge global audience that’s been building exponentially ever since. As I began to further explore the roster of the same record company, I found A Winged Victory for the Sullen (pictured above) and I was completely swept up in the beautiful atmospheres of their album Atomos, which was my Album of the Year last year.

Nils Frahm and A Winged Victory for the Sullen are completely re-imagining a future for music with classical roots. They are drawing in contemporary musical influences, using state-of-the-art production techniques, building their own instruments and staging mind-blowing live shows the world over. These artists have captivated a whole new generation of fans, many of whom have discovered them through my radio shows. So this is a narrative that we all share, a story we built together, which becomes physical at the Prom.

Wayne McGregor and his dancers have been deeply inspired by the work of A Winged Victory for the Sullen. In fact, the album Atomos was written as a score for a dance piece by Wayne McGregor and on Wednesday, his dancers will illuminate a part of A Winged Victory’s set, as their very special guests.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen will open the Prom, followed by Nils Frahm, and the two sets will intertwine in the centre. Nils loves to improvise, and A Winged Victory prefer to write and rehearse. So the process by which the collaboration will come together remains a mystery.

But as Francis Bacon once said, "The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery."

Mary Anne Hobbs is a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music.

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