Brandt Brauer Frick w/ Om 'Mas Keith, XOYO, London
- Written by Robert Freeman
In the terrifying collision of man and machine that is twenty-first century electronic music, ‘performers’ are disappearing behind the cut and paste, loops and samples. Emphasis has been put on making the machines sing ,whilst faces behind them exist only as an extension of the instrument. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in dance music, and nowhere is dance music more prevalent than Berlin.
Renowned for an ability to get a song out of a couple of spoons, vocals on Brandt Brauer Frick tracks tend to exist as a repeated refrain over the beat (Emika’s track on Mr. Machine for example) as opposed to a melody. The tour for new album Miami though, sees the group snagging grammy-winning-Frank-Ocean-sa-ra-member-producer-cum-vocalist, Om’Mas Keith to accompany them.
Gone is the stripped-down percussive drum ebb and the plonk of the piano loop from their ten-piece ensemble tour (there’s not a lot of space in the brickwork-industrial surroundings of XOYO to be fair) instead finding itself replaced with some serious tech-house. The classical element (in the sense that there’s composition involved) still remains in the complicated rhythmical structure, but the music is more charged, aggressive. In a venue known as much for a Skream night as for a Veronica Falls gig, the beatier end of the spectrum comes as no surprise.
Brandt bobs up and down behind the drums, Frick/Brauer leap around the boards like grinning, knob-twiddling monkeys and Keith stands at the microphone shrieking like a Maenad and noodling about on the synth. As the night progresses, Keith morphs into tech Mary Poppins, pulling all manner of instruments from his bag. Maracas, recorders, there’s even a cow bell for about 5 seconds. The paranoid beat is still there, but this sounds less like a spy film and more like a club night - whilst the trio may look haphazard, there is a precision to their music, perfectly balanced and executed, complemented by the technical improvisation of Keith. This is house, Jim, but not as we know it.