Artist verifiedBrandt Brauer Frick

The Berlin-based Brandt Brauer Frick make what they call "emotional body music" or lean techno with supple and primarily acoustic instrumentation.

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Brandt Brauer Frick

Biography

In 2020, Brandt Brauer Frick got back to work with the spontaneity and excitement that have characterised them since their beginnings. These early work and improvisation sessions were driven by a powerful urge: "We wanted to go back to club music, and write more minimal music without overdoing it in the arrangements and production. We worked very freely. We sometimes started with a beat programmed on a machine, other times with a percussive rhythm or an instrumental sequence played on the piano or the synthesiser in our studio. The record also has a narrative element directly inspired by the way a night in a club unfolds, as you go through these different experiences", explains the band. This inspired them to find a title in the early stages of the record-making process: Multi Faith Prayer Room. An entire aesthetic method began to slowly materialise, extending far beyond the confines of the concept album. After years spent travelling the world, the three musicians were faced with a rather difficult observation: “We feel like we’re drowning in the present. People are unable to project themselves into an idea of the future in the same way some did in the 1970’s, for example. We decided to reconnect with the concept of utopia and encourage positive thinking about the future in our own way, away from the rise of populism.” Multi Faith Prayer Room thus became a vehicle for the group's vision: a polyphonic audiovisual space where all voices can be heard as they rebuild their own stories. Brandt Brauer Frick’s music has always been an inclusive communal space that celebrates a certain openness to the world, perpetuating the legacy of electronic music and its focus on human and societal issues. With Multi Faith Prayer Room, the band decided to take this approach even further by exploring new environments. The trio prepared a questionnaire which was sent to 500 people of various backgrounds and origins, asking them about their visions of tomorrow, their faith in the future and their relationship to present-day rituals. Through this aesthetic and social approach, the trio put together an interactive installation, collaborating with journalist, curator and gallery owner Max Dax, and making a grand entrance into the world of visual arts and design with a launch at the Miami Art Fair in late 2022. This installation is in perfect alignment with the band's most innovative, melodic and accessible record yet, which is firmly rooted in a salutary form of collective reflection. “We used to sound like a strange translation of classical music. But this time around, we've taken that as our starting point to build a bridge between pop and club music,” the trio explains. Infused with powerful and dramatic instrumental tracks that echo the insights offered by the Multi Faith Prayer Room, Brandt Brauer Frick deliberately left spaces open in their music as an invitation for guest vocalists such as Mykki Blanco, Sophie Hunger, Azekel & Marina Herlop or Duane Harden to inhabit them. “We wanted to collaborate with people from various musical scenes and backgrounds, in the spirit of our concept for the Multi Faith Prayer Room,” the band insists. Their voices were sampled and often played as instruments, with the art of the vocal loop in French house music being cited as a direct sonic influence. The band also collaborated with Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour and cartoonist Jamie Wolfe on the video for Mad Rush, an ambitious visual work condemning the status of women in Iran and promoting a message of peace, respect and tolerance. Multi Faith Prayer Room showcases a band at the peak of its form, both in substance and in form. It is an electronic music record that gracefully blends instrumental performances, digital production work and melodic pop writing. This new set of tracks and its accompanying visuals are a testament to their inspiring versatility and gift for a mutant style of composition which experiments without ever leaving its audience on the sidelines. Here, dance floor-ready tracks rub shoulders with futuristic protest songs or slow-moving analogue tracks. House, electronic soul, techno, electro-acoustic music, synth pop, future R’n’B– transcending all genres, Brandt Brauer Frick has produced a rare and intoxicating nectar of new music. Multi Faith Prayer Room was conceived by its authors as a creative utopia of freedom and a message of hope. It is also one of the most inventive, ardent and relevant records of the moment– the hallmark of a band that remains close to its audience, embodying alongside it the vision of a creative and optimistic future.