Award-winning Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds has premiered the first song from his new album 'The Chopin Project' - a collaboration with German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott - on The Line Of Best Fit. The track is titled 'Verses', and gives us a taste of what is to come on March 16th, when the album in full will be released. Arnalds utilised vintage equipment and techniques to create this stunning, melancholy new reimagining of Chopin's work. "Verses is a new composition by me which uses the famous right hand motif from Piano Sonata No3 (Largo) and is followed by that part of that Sonata in its original version played on the piano by Alice," Arnalds explained to Line Of Best Fit. "So you hear the motif first recomposed arranged for a string quartet and then just a couple of minutes you will hear it in it's original state played on the piano. "With this I wanted to show listeners quite clearly what I was doing with 'Verses', which they might not realise is composed around a motif from the sonata unless they hear the original sonata next to it."

Standing at the intersection where techno meets classical music, Ólafur Arnalds directs the newest Late Night Tales. After releasing the breakthrough album ‘And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness’, in 2014 he was awarded a BAFTA for best original music for the TV series Broadchurch. Arnalds’ music has a quietude that seems perfectly apposite and that’s evident here as each song drifts like an autumn wind towards the next. Arnalds has enlisted the help of a few of his countrymen for the journey out west – electronic bands Samaris and Hjaltalín – and just as his records manage to combine the experimentalism and adventure of electronic music with a classical sensibility, here he weaves them perfectly, using tracks like Koreless’ brilliant post-dubstep ‘Last Remnants’ alongside the enigmatic brilliance of Jai Paul. It’s a perfect musical landscape that is eerie yet beautiful, as on Odesza’s ‘How Did I Get Here’. As if Ólafur wasn’t spoiling us enough, he offers up three exclusives: his own ‘Kinesthesia I’ and ‘RGB’ and ‘Orgoned’ by his techno side project Kiasmos. Alongside that we have the obligatory cover version (Destiny’s Child’s ‘Say My Name’) and also a Late Night Tales debut for David Tennant, reading a story by Anam Sufi, with whom Ólafur worked on Broadchurch. "When I was asked to do the next installation of the Late Night Tales series I thought "This will be fun and easy, only a couple of days work. No problem!". Six months later, I was still pulling my hair out in some kind of quest to make the perfect mix. As someone who has never really done mixes before, I learned a lot of things along the way and the whole experience was very inspiring. I decided to approach the mix in a similar way as I would one of my scores. This is the soundtrack of my life. I included songs from many of my friends and collaborators and tried to deliver a mix that represents who I am as an artist and where my influences are coming from - both personally and musically.”

Since 2012 Erased Tapes peers Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm have spent many hours together in their studios across Berlin and Reykjavik, freely improvising and occasionally capturing the music for their fans. The duo's sound is an astoundingly rich, tonally pure example of synth-driven experimentation, conceived and performed by two prolific collaborators. During a session at Nils's Durton Studio in Berlin last summer the two specially invited photographer Alexander Schneider to capture one of their unique improvised sessions. Lasting long into the night, the pair gradually and organically formed several individual songs – each contributing to the narrative of a larger, transformative piece of music. Recorded in eight hours with no overdubs or edits, 'Trance Frendz' is a captivating journey through grand soundscapes and droning crescendos which crash and recede back, making way for delicate piano notes and swirling synthesizers.