Formed in Düsseldorf, Germany, Grandbrothers' music represents a communion between the old and the new, and is centered around the collaboration between pianist Erol Sarp and engineer/software designer Lukas Vogel.
On their extraordinary new album, Late Reflections (out April 14), the duo places their art in communion with an institution so old it predates their music by seven centuries: Cologne Cathedral. The album pulses with a sense of history and architecture, shaped and deepened by the spatial properties of the extraordinary building.
The idea emerged when the church’s master builder unexpectedly asked if they wanted to perform a concert there. Three years later, Grandbrothers played a one-of-a-kind concert in the Cathedral, performing music that had been designed for the vast size and acoustics. Leading up to the concert, Sarp and Vogel wound up preparing a whole album’s worth of material, which turned into Late Reflections.
At its core, this is a deeply collaborative album — a collaboration between Grandbrothers and the Cathedral itself, which subtly steered the duo towards more ambient, atmospheric sounds. Late Reflections is evocative and immersive, and asks such questions as: What does it mean for music to interact with architecture and physical space? How can composers keep their approach fresh more than a decade into their career? For Grandbrothers, the answer was to go where no recording artist has gone before, even if 20,000 visitors go there each day.
