Marienborn by Brueder Selke

The East Berlin-born, Potsdam-based polyinstrumental composer duo Brueder Selke, Sebastian Selke on cello and Daniel Selke on piano, also known by their award-winning alias CEEYS, presents the unusual piano duo album MARIENBORN. It is named after the former Grenzuebergangsstelle Marienborn (border crossing Marienborn), which is a memorial today.

Musically the album is mainly based on a selection of special samples. On the one hand, these come from a library that the two produced on commission for the Canadian content provider LandR.
The second package of the series, Prepared Piano internally called GO EAST II - Pianos, centers on two upright pianos from Daniel's childhood that he still plays today. One was built in the former GDR by Alexander Herrmann at VEB Deutsche Piano Union Leipzig and was damped here with moderator and felt. The other piano was made by the Steck company, a subsidiary brand of Aeolian Piano, a large number of which were made in Gotha, also in East Germany.

The loops of the pianos were first meticulously composed and recorded at the Brueder Selke's Klingenthal Studio in Potsdam. Then they were variously edited and combined for the album. Coupled with a fine feeling for asymmetrical time signatures and tempos, as known from electronic genres, a number of dual effects, such as ping-pong delay, a stereo spring reverb and finally a sequenced analog filter are used and finally travel through a quartet of legendary elaborately restored RFZ preamplifiers.

Thus, the entire working method follows the aesthetics of analog recordings on the one hand, but digital production techniques in post-processing on the other. The free overlaying of different phrases, lets the two pianos merge and sound like ONE instrument. In addition to the pianos, textures of a virtual string quartet become audible, masterfully created by Ólafur Arnalds and Viktor Orri Árnason, for which Sebastian had played the cello part at the time.

A finely adjusted backdrop of subtle pedal noises from the pianos, fingers that only gently graze the strings, and last but not least, small framing drones from the string quartet put the album in a suspended state between intimacy and expansiveness.

The creatively interlocking approach of Brueder Selke follows a meaning-giving idea to which both remain deeply committed, searching for harmony between musical profession and human existence through a constant balance of elements of their works. Their approach of reduction is applied to a contemporary aesthetic based on their personal experiences and dealing with the everyday constraints of life in what was then socialist East Germany.

As CEEYS, both have released six albums and three dilogies, respectively, under the radar, so to speak, recounting episodes of their childhood in the former GDR, and under which the acoustic HAUSMUSIK and the accompanying rework MUSIKHAUS lead to a current positioning, classification and perspective of their work today.

Just as the former checkpoint facilitated the transition between the two German states, the album MARIENBORN, with its purposefully placed delicate textures, minimalist figures and an intimately rooted sense of it, seeks to address and overcome separation and division.

Following the early 2022 cassette release of their former 2016 debut THE GRUNEWALD CHURCH SESSION as CEEYS in early 2022, it is thereby heard as the responding second part of a hybrid album dilogy, which can be seen as a turning point in the work of the duo collaboration in terms of instrumentation and production style. Here the two long-term musical partners present pieces for the first time in an unfamiliar form and under their real name - Brueder Selke, a new perspective.

composer & curator

bruederselke.com
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