Brandt Brauer Frick have done it again. Last year, the German trio’s debut album, You Make Me Real, successfully fused techno and classical music. Now Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer and Paul Frick have taken their genre-defying experiment to the next level with the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble. They’ve ditched the computers they used to arrange You Make Me Real and expanded the band to a ten-piece so they can play handcrafted dance grooves completely live.

The new album, Mr. Machine is recorded using the same handmade approach, using an opulent and unconventional instrumentation: violin, cello, harp, piano, trombone, tuba, timpani, marimba, vibraphone, drumset, various percussion and a Moog synthesizer.

We asked them to choose the track that best represents the album and what went into that specific track in terms of ideas, studio work, and inspirations, and this is what Paul Frick had to say about the Ensemble version of “You Make Me Real,” from the Mr. Machine album:

We work in a ping pong process in which harmonic, melodies and percussive ideas trigger each other in the making. And we often use any instrument like percussion. The piano hook actually doesn’t have a melody, it mainly makes the groove. In the first part of the piece there is a lot of improvisation. We wanted each musician to get the weirdest and most beautiful sounds out of his instrument. For example the trombone that makes air sounds, violin and cello that scratch on their strings, make glissandi. The piano is played like a harp, picking the strings instead of playing the keys. And so on… We had fully composed the rest of the piece, so we knew what we wanted before we recorded it. We had to make sure the result matched our imagination, and we recorded quite a lot of takes. “You Make Me Real” is very cinematic, so I think some of us had images in mind, but nothing precise we talked about. Like all of our music, it first started as a jam session, and it was one of the pieces that surprised ourselves, also because it’s pretty far from a techno track. Maybe it’s got a slight dubstep vibe, but that was not conscious.

Listen to the track: You Make Me Real

An appearance at Coachella in April kicked off their festival season and the band will be coming back over to the US for the release and performing live in a stripped down version of the full ensemble. This is definitely a not to be missed performance!

US Tour Dates

11/01 – Tallahassee, FL: Club Down Under / FSU

11/03 – Dallas, TX – The Prophet Bar

11/05 – Austin, TX – Fun Fun Fun Fest

11/09 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar

11/10 – Los Angeles – Satellite Lounce

11/11 – San Francisco, CA – The Rickshaw Stop

11/12 – Los Angeles, CA – Luckman Fine Arts Complex