Gilles Peterson @ Musique Non Stop |  |
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Posted: 14 Aug 2013 07:12 AM PDT
 Today we hear from German dup Grandbrothers in the run up to the release of the tenth Brownswood Bubblers. Read what they have to say below and pre-order the album from these outlets: Bandcamp / iTunes / Bleep / Juno / Amazon / Boomkat Check the teaser for the album below: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself please. Who are you, where are you from etc.? We are Erol and Lukas and started making music together as grandbrothers about a year and a half ago. We met each other at our university in Duesseldorf (Germany) – that’s also where we are based. Western Germany to be more specific, as we don’t live in Duesseldorf anymore. But yeah… that’s where it all started. How would you describe your music? We had this idea of experimenting with sounds that we could get out of a grand piano that you usually don’t get when you are playing it the way you are meant to play it – using the keys. So we started experimenting and knocking and plugging everything we could and started to build little hammers that we could attach to the strings or other parts of the piano. Those hammers can be played and programmed by a software we wrote ourselves and we also wrote a software that we use to work with some live-sampling. So we have hammers, sampling and conventional playing and from there we go into every direction that we like. At the moment you could say we are moving somewhere between classical minimal music, electronica, dance music, some spherical things, … not that easy to label – what we want to do is get the piano to a club and see people dancing! Where do you draw your inspiration from? Listening to all kinds of music keeps our ideas fresh – we love hip hop, we love funk, we love soul, we love jazz, we love electronical music, we love dubstep, we love classical music. One of us (won’t say who) was a big trance and GOA-fan back in the days, the other one used to be a metalhead with long hair (won’t say who either) as a teenager. So we have all these backgrounds and listen to all those great, great artists and talk a lot about music basically all the time we can. And of course listening to radioshows, mixtapes etc. always helps. Whom do you count amongst your most significant influences when it comes to production? As for creating the sound itself we learned a lot from composers like John Cage, who has to be named as one of the most important musicians when it comes to working with prepared pianos and unconventional sounds, or Conlon Nancarrow, who composed a lot for piano rolls – sounds awfully horrible, but totally opened our minds for working with that kind of stuff. As for composing, we should definitely mention Steve Reich, from who we learned a lot about working with patterns and how to evolve to something bigfrom a small musical idea or phrase. Also Ryuichi Sakamoto taught us a lot about working with minimalistic ideas and working with spaces. There’s a lot more of them, Eric Satie for example, Debussy… and of course there’s the electronical part where we listened to guys like Aphex Twin, Brandt Brauer Frick, The Cinematic Orchestra, Bonobo, all the good guys, that helped us tounderstand making music and composing. What releases / gigs are out there or coming soon? There’s going to be a release which features 3 tracks of our current EP ’12V/3A’ by a label called FILM from Berlin, which also will have a few remixes on it that will come out within the next two months. As for gigs, we’ll be playing two festivals here in Duesseldorf (aren’t announced yet, so we can’t say which) and a few gigs in the area – and when the whole thing develops we hopefully get to play the UK and the rest of the world. Do you have a current DJ mix or any tracks that are available for free download right now that we could point folks to? There’s a lot of stuff hapenning in the background at the moment, but things aren’t official yet, so unfortunately we can’t talk about that at the moment. But stay tuned, there’s some heavy shit coming! Where can folks go online to check out you and your music? People can find us on facebook (facebook.com/grandbrothers),soundcloud.com/grandbrothers and on our bandcamp page (grandbrothers.bandcamp.com). We should think about a proper homepage as well… What are you going to do after this interview? Reread it a million times and look for mistakes. Most of it seems to be true… — Check the rest of the Bubblers profiles: Phillip Owusu // Contact Field Orchestra // Bambooman // Nia Andrews // ESKA // Oscar & Martin // João Sobral // The Memory Band  |
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