German composer Nils Frahm has linked up with childhood friends Frederic Gmeiner & Sebastian Singwald to release “the gamble”

Now going by the name nonkeen, the trio first met at primary school in a rural suburb of Hamburg. As kids, they would make their own radio shows on rudimentary tape machine, with Frahm and his friend Frederic Gmeiner joined by East German schoolboy Sebastian Singwald in the summer of 1989 when he came over the border on an exchange with his athletics team.

Throughout the 90s they would send each other their recordings, meeting each summer to perform their own material. Much later, with all three living in Berlin, they resolved to pick up their instruments again and began recording long experimental sessions in Singwald’s basement, adding parts to some of their childhood recordings and sampling others. The band refused to practise songs or record multiple takes, but they would pick their favourite passages and bounce them to computer to stitch them together. After eight years they decided they had finally finished an album.

nonkeen’s The Gamble is out on February 5.