Grandbrothers Serenade a Cathedral

Out now via City Slang / Irascible is the truly extraordinary new album from Grandbrothers. Entitled “Late Reflections”, it was entirely recorded inside Cologne Cathedral, following on from a concert to celebrate the 700 years anniversary of the Cathedral’s choir in 2022.

Grandbrothers are Erol Sarp, a German pianist, and Lukas Vogel, a software designer and sound engineer from Zurich. Inspired by the likes of John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Steve Reich, but also contemporary electronic experimenters like Jon Hopkins or Aphex Twin, they have created a complex set-up that combines a conventional grand piano with a mechanical contraption that plucks, hits and tickles the piano strings, and a computer/sampler that allows the resulting sounds to be manipulated live on stage. “Late Reflections” is their fourth album.

Here’s the interesting things Sarp and Vogel have to say about the experience:

“This album is the result of an invitation that we received from the master builder of Cologne Cathedral, Peter Füssenich, back in 2019. He asked us if we could imagine playing a concert in the cathedral for the 700 years anniversary of the choir, which was consecrated in 1322.

“Having spent some time of our lives in this city and the whole area, we know of the importance and meaning of this building and knowing this would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, we wanted to write new music for this event.

“They invited us to do some tests with a piano and also gave us an example of the organ there and from the first second on we witnessed how amazing sound travels through that room and that we wanted to make use of that. The cathedral has a reverberation time of approximately 13 seconds (which is a lot!) and once we started writing, the room became an instrument itself.

“By the time we were in the middle of composing, we noticed that we didn’t “just” want to play a concert there but also to put this whole music on an album. For a few nights in July 2022 we were allowed to do the recordings inside the Cathedral and trying to describe what a feeling that was is still hard to do. It’s not the ideal recording situation to be honest – being placed in the middle of the city you have a lot of noises (trains, people, sirens…) and we also had to bring all the equipment, set it up every night and make sure everything was cleaned up when we left in the morning, but it was one of the coolest things we ever did.

Grandbrothers
City Slang
Irascible