Grandbrothers have shared a cinematic new video for “All The Unknown,“ the title track from their third album which is set for January 15th release on City Slang.
The visually striking, surreal clip explores and maximises the dramatic builds and crescendos within Grandbrothers‘ expressive music. Speaking on the video, the band comment: “We worked closely with our good friends and filmmakers Manfred Borsch and Malte Thuilot, because they had us hooked with their ideas and vision for this project. We felt that they could perfectly put into pictures, what we only can express with music.“
The video’s director, Manfred Borsch adds: “The brilliant and deeply touching work of Grandbrothers offers an unbelievable visual playground and creates pictures in the mind of each individual. We are enormously grateful that we were allowed to bring our own visual feelings to this project.”
On the leafy cover Grandbrothers invite the spectator to peer through the thick foliage of a hawthorn bush, seemingly powered by a similar sense of curiosity that informed this exploratory new record. Ditching the restrictions of their former setup, with their new record the Turkish-German/Swiss duo took a leap into the dense unknown—and landed on their feet.
The album maps out a wide-open soundworld of compositional possibilities for pianist Erol Sarp and producer / electronic engineer Lukas Vogel, who have been putting their modern and unique electronic spin on prepared piano since first forming in 2012. Forgoing the need to play every single note live, this new album sees the pair juxtapose the old and new once again, venturing further into the electronic cosmos armed with a grand piano, self-built computer-controlled mechanics, and a new sense of latitude.
Listen closely to this latest album and you can hear an old-school hip-hop beat enmeshed in melodic piano, or feel the cold rush of techno fly past at lightning speed. “We wanted to leave the lovely romantic piano music behind,” explains Sarp, whose affinity with dance music has always been an influence on his writing process. Motifs of club music creep subtly into ‘All The Unknown’’s impeccably textured palette, which nonetheless uses sounds found exclusively within the piano. These sounds and samples are triggered and collected using mechanics built by Vogel and placed inside the piano, then extracted, processed and shaped beyond their original identity to create alien beeps, beats and tones. Melding these with the organic piano sounds is what fuels Grandbrothers’ creativity.
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