Brandt Brauer Fricke

There’s a common thread that runs through all of Brandt Brauer Frick’s music. It is this: interesting things happen at the interface of machine and hand-made music. The Berlin trio’s 2010 album, ‘You Make Me Real’, fused techno and classical. The 2011 follow-up, ‘Mr Machine’, saw them go the whole classicalmeets-club hog with a ten-piece ensemble playing dance music live. Then came ‘Miami’, a darker, more song-based collection exploring the same man-machine ideas.

The Berlin trio’s instalment of the DJ-Kicks series does the same thing with a mix. Not for them the algorithmic rigidity of cutting and pasting tracks together on Ableton. They recorded the mix in one day, out of hours at Berlin’s legendary Watergate club, using only vinyl and dub plates. “We didn’t want to record it in our studio or at home, mainly because we preferred an
intense session with limited time,” explains Paul Frick. “That feels more like a unique situation and it enforces the tension and the necessity to do it right. Because we mixed it live there are mistakes and flaws, some rougher transitions in there. We are not super technical DJs. We like it when you hear those imprecisions because it’s human. It feels like someone is behind the mix, rather than a computer.”

After all the conceptualising, perhaps most importantly of all, the end result is that rare thing: a dancefloor mix full of emotion. Interesting things happen when humans and machines meet.