If any building on Earth can truly be called ‘monolithic’, it is Cologne Cathedral. The tallest twin-spired church in the world, it took five and a half centuries to build, and standing by it today, the effect medieval architects intended – feeling very small before a Gothic grandeur that represented the power of God – is still palpable.
Making music that can stand up to such a building is a tall order. Yet, last year, Düsseldorf duo Grandbrothers, comprised of German-Turkish pianist Erol Sarp and Swiss engineer and software designer Lukas Vogel, stepped up to exactly that challenge. Having composed some expansive, ambient tracks for the 700-year anniversary of the consecration of the oldest part of the cathedral, they performed it last summer in the building itself, a concert that was recorded for European arts channel ARTE.
That specially-written music became Late Reflections, Grandbrothers’ fourth album. Released this week, it was recorded in the cathedral over a series of nights, after the tourist crowds had left (it is, after all, Germany’s most-visited landmark). The acoustics provided by a 45-metre high, centuries-old vaulted ceiling made it surely the most unique recording studio in the world.
This is music deeply concerned with the limits of the acoustic – every sound in Grandbrothers’ music comes from Sarp’s piano, which is rigged up with mechanised hammers linked to Vogel’s console and programmed to strike different parts of the instrument. This rather Heath Robinson set-up blurs the boundary between the acoustic and electronic and means that the highly lyrical ‘voice’ of Sarp’s glittering piano lines is given an abstracted but richly atmospheric backing by Vogel’s digital manipulations.
Past releases performed during the ARTE concert were proof of the validity of this unique concept.
From the exquisitely moving Auberge, to the simply massive-sounding All The Unknown, which utilised the musique concrète feel of those hammers to verge on the industrial, and the energising Bloodflow channelling the minimalism of Steve Reich, Grandbrothers are utterly engaging.
On Late Reflections the duo take a turn towards greater ambient depth, and at its best the album has a sense of mystery that seems to reach back through the centuries. A stand-out track is Adrift, which moves from an electronically-induced sense of alienation to a soaring emotional insistence as Sarp’s piano pitches in, and here it really feels like Grandbrothers have succeeded in matching the cathedral’s emotional heft as a symbol of the greatest achievements of European civilisation.
While Grandbrothers have described their music as representing “a communion between the old and the new’, on Late Reflections, they have created something which explores another type of communion too – that between music and physical space.
Last year’s European tour was another experiment in that communion, showing their music could work just as well on the dancefloor of an uber-cool Lisbon club as Ireland’s National Concert Hall. This album proves that music and space are interrelated in a way that is rarely probed but which is full of possibilities
