"It Came Through the Music": In Depth With Brandt Brauer Frick

Few acts manage to perform in such varied settings as Berlin-based trio Brandt Brauer Frick. Taking influence from a plethora of differing musical scenes, the band have toured worldwide, performing in venues ranging from Theatres & Concert Halls to dance festivals and Techno clubs, both as a Trio, and backed by a ten piece ensemble. Their recorded works have also been much celebrated. Whilst their early release take influence from the early sound of Detroit Techno, over recent years the group's sound has mutated into something much more self-contained, their latest album Miami garnering strong reviews for it's darkly avante-garde, jazz-tinged soundscapes. With a performance in Room One scheduled for the 16th alongside Margaret Dygas & Craig Richards, we caught up with Jan Brauer & Paul Frick to discuss the difference between their performances as the trio and the ensemble, last minute replacements and the ideas and concepts behind Miami. So first off I wanted to ask how did you guys all meet, was it under musical circumstances? JB: Daniel and I were at the same school, we didn't go to the same classes or anything but we met in the school band. He was playing drums and I played keyboard and from then we just stuck together and made another band and then another project, and finally we became 'Scott' - like a House music duo, and that's when we started playing. That's how we met Paul because we were releasing on the same label. We were playing at a party in Barcelona together and that's when we met. We invited him to the studio and he came down for four days, and we made some music and that was basically how we all started. PF: It came through the music basically. I saw you perform at Atonal earlier this year incidentally, obviously Kraftwerk is an absolutely amazing space for any kind of performance – how important do you think the venue or setting is to your shows in general? PF: It is always very important and we are actually very privileged to be booked in so many different contexts with so many different audiences.We play classical music festivals, jazz festivals and techno clubs and it's always very different. I mean the pre-disposition, we are not always totally sure. The ensemble gig like the one you saw is often a bit better when people are seated but we are not even sure what place our music is made for, we just want to try them all out. It is of course more about creative and imaginary space within music. JB: I think in general the venue and the sound and stuff is really important to any kind of music, especially if you are doing electronic music. With the three piece version then you totally have to rely on the soundsystem and the room and stuff like this but as you can't do anything about it in most cases you just have to adapt if it's not working very well. It's doesn't happen everytime we play, but often we just get the feeling tonight the venue the sound and everything has become one big thing and that's a particularly good thing to achieve. Sometimes that happens. Have you found yourselves playing less in club environment with doing the ensemble thing these days? JB: At the beginning we were only playing in clubs. Since we started the ensemble and the three piece show which has become a bit more like a band show anyway, we are playing more and more festivals so it's definitely changed. We are not playing in clubs that often anymore, it's rather festivals or proper concerts. We are always really happy I think or I can say for me always with once in a while playing in a proper club, without a stage or even on a small stage like in room one, because in a club you don't have this big gap between you and the audience visually. The two types of performances must be really quite different even though musically it's still the three of you. PF: In many clubs we don't fit anymore because of the space we need even with the trio. But yeah, so far I think the earliest thing we've had was at Jazz festival at eleven in the morning, maybe the latest gig was also something like eleven in the morning, but twenty-four hours later! It's really inspiring for us to see the contrast and imagine; lets say we have a trio show one day and the next day we fly somewhere and play with the ensemble and maybe afterwards we DJ at a party. Sometimes it's very confusing, but actually that's what keeps it rolling and always when we have too much of one thing we want to do the other. That's quite nice - the variation makes things more interesting. JB: It's really keeping us alive you know. We've had so many gigs in the last two years and each year it would be all the same and we'd always have the same situations - I think all three of us would go really mad. We just need a bit more suspension to always come up with something new. PF: We do many collaborations like going on tour with somebody like we did with Om'Mas Keith in March, and now we are playing a couple of gigs with an artist from Montreal. When we and the people we collaborated with on our last album like Jamie Lidell and Gudrun Gut happen to be in the same place we also try to perform together. Also, you have to imagine with the ensemble it's not always the same people because sometime we need replacements you know. So far we have five different Cello players, five different Violin players so sometimes it's too much change because you can't get into a routine, but actually that's what makes it interesting. Is it hard to find the musicians for the ensemble? I suppose they need to have an appreciation of both sides of the project - the club aspect and the more classical side. JB: Yeah usually they are really open for all kinds of things. I don't know it's probably not that easy, but we are really happy with everyone together, and we even have two or three players of each instrument. It's actually great because each one has their own quality. I would say by now we are very lucky that we have this pool of musicians who know even more musicians. Lately even if we didn't have the right musicians we had people recommended so by now it's cool to actually have musicians writing us saying 'hey, can we play with you sometime'. A couple of weeks ago we had a show in Mexico City - it was probably the first show where we took the whole ensemble across the ocean, and just one day before the show, our percussionist's son got really sick and I think he came up with a guy from Mexico City. About ten years ago he had studied with this guy from Mexico City and from him we got recommendations, and got a really top-notch, badass percussionist. He just learned it all in one day and he was good. That's like super tough but when it works you're just like 'wow'. It was great to just play with somebody local – that was at Mutek festival. In terms of the audience as well, like I was saying about the musicians needing an appreciation of both sides of the project you need to be quite open minded. Do you get people who have seen you in concert settings come to see you in clubs and things like that? I imagine you attract quite a diverse audience that way. JB: Totally, we get both young and old people. PF: It's funny, we often have people who are like confused. Of course this causes a bit of confusion as many people have already told us marketing-wise people don't know what they get because it's always something different, but in the end there's nothing we want to change. I think we will cause more confusion because we are going in more extreme directions, and doing the DJ Kicks which we are finishing right now, but directly afterwards we are making a big project with a German choir of fifty singers and the ensemble, so sixty musicians. JB: Sometimes I don't think the confusion is made by us, rather it's a mirror of the industry. Sometimes it's just that the booker doesn't understand things the right way, or the promoter writes Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, and its just the trio or the other way round. It's always people asking us 'where's the ensemble?!' and then we have to say 'there wasn't an ensemble today at all' so it's funny, but at the same time sometimes it's a bit tense. PF: I think it has even caused some good confusions too. For example I remember in 2011, we met the main guy who had booked us at Coachella and he thought he had booked the ensemble so there was a misunderstanding and he was 'oh there's only three of you, okay well you can play anyway' but I don't know if he had found us at that time because we were really unknown to be just just the three of us on stage, but we just did it and he liked it and it was actually really cool. At fabric it's the Trio right? PF: Yeah, we've played Fabric once before in 2011, it was pretty much exactly two years ago, but now we have a bit of a different setup too because then Daniel didn't play real drums. Now he plays the acoustic drum kit with some trigger pads. Well actually it's a Nord drums, I don't know if you know it. Nord drums is a perfect drum synthesiser, it's just a tiny little thing but it has a great dynamic. Is there anyone you're looking forward to seeing particularly on the 16th? PF: I think especially Margaret Dygas is very interesting, I haven't followed her much in the last two years but I have some great records of her – the one on Perlon - it's amazing. She's really also pretty indivisible and that's I don't know... We are always looking for surprises because when you are in Berlin and you have the same Techno all the time - you get bored. Have you taken much influence from some of the other acts with a similar musical crossover to yourselves such as the Moritz Von Oswald Trio or Vladislav Delay Quartet? PF: I don't know, I mean the Moritz Von Oswald Trio - I think are great, we've played the same line up as them twice or so. It's great but it's not a direct inspiration. I mean actually the old Basic Channel stuff might be more so, you know. When we started this it was totally in the air this whole thing. Working with Classical instruments, many people had done this before and for us, most of the time it was like a negative example, it sounds too much like Hollywood. I don't want to say specifically what I'm talking about, I don't mean that about Moritz Von Oswald. But it was more like can we use these instruments in a much deeper way. It felt like most of these projects had a big Techno style with an orchestra. We are more influenced by all types of bands, like Can for example. More of the stuff where they made some fusion between very different things, but without labelling it. There have been many misunderstandings because in the press we are always labelled as Techno meets classical music which actually is bullshit because it's a total simplification. Classical music means a time lapse of five-hundred years of music that's more diverse than say Ambient, Salsa and Death Metal, so it's like classical music what are we actually talking about you know? Classical music can be anything. For us it's more that we are not orthodox, we actually use all types of stuff. Like right now for DJ Kicks we made some new stuff with many synthesisers - it can also be like purely electronic sounding. The means, how to create the music is not priority number one, it is what means we find most interesting when we are doing something in the moment where we want to express something. It's not like we have a dogma that we only use this and that, we use anything. I guess in the press there is a tendency if you take influence from two things to present it as a fusion of those two things when really that isn't necessarily the case - you appreciate both and they both influence you but that doesn't mean it's a concerted effort to blend them you know. PF: Yeah, I mean I guess it has also served us you know. Like maybe if you Google 'Techno & classical music' maybe they will find us! Also being labelled like that has opened many doors at the same time but it's still imprecise and we can't identify with it. It just sounds totally random to us. Definitely listening to tracks from Miami recently I wasn't thinking this is Techno played with some Classical instruments - it sounds like something totally different to me. JB: Compared to the two records we have done before it's a whole different thing. PF: It's certainly also maybe less obviously Techno, the first album was probably more directly inspired by Techno. Can you tell us a little bit more about the ideas behind the Miami album in general? You had a concept behind the album right? PF: Yeah, but the idea came with the music. I mean the word Miami is more of a vague association. When we started to make the record we had just gone through the first time travelling intensely and seeing all these places, and it's maybe part of the divisible description of the world state. Also to paint the world the way we see it, because of course when you are touring you always meet more people than when you just travel normally. You always get into something really intense and often it's really blinky and grey and so on. But then with the stories behind it you see the difference between the appearance and also what these places have in peoples minds. Dystopia maybe - when you want to describe really dark things. You can think of Miami maybe also as something like Atlantis, a city where everything is blinking and shiny at the top of civilisation but on the other side its like about to go down. Finally, what is coming up in the future in terms of releases and gigs? When will the DJ Kicks CD be released? PF: It's in February. At the end of the year we aren't playing that much because we have a lot of work with our Choir project. JB: We are playing a couple of gigs in Switzerland, and we are also playing in Paris and in Berlin.