Frank Bretschneider
Frank Bretschneider is a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Bretschneider’s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
Frank Bretschneider is a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Bretschneider’s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
Pounding
Unequal cycles searching for synchronous experiences: On his new album »Pounding«, Frank Bretschneider tells of distance, convergence and congruence in a continuous, ever-changing flow of events. What is often considered to be an unquestionable dogma in club music (for which Bretschneider has provided significant impetus since the 1990s) – the groove – appears precarious, unstable, and in motion. Pulse and accent are volatile encounters and have to be found again and again for short, delightful …
Rausch
Komet // Frank Bretschneider is one of the founders of the esteemed raster-media label. This album - originally a CD released on 12k in 2000, features clean sine-tones and an austere sound palette contrasted with playful polymetric rhythms.
Curve
Keplar releases a vinyl reissue of 2001’s »Curve,« the second album released by Frank Bretschneider on Mille Plateaux under his real name. »Curve« saw him pick up on the underlying concept of 1999’s »Rand,« but gave his explorations of the sonic and stylistic range of electronic music notably more space and time to unfold.
Merging compositional minimalism with sonic complexity, the eight tracks display an affinity for the production techniques of dub music, which had already been a major referen…
Con-struct
LP version. About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to…
Balance
The album 'Balance' by Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree was originally released in 2002 by Mille Plateaux on CD only. The 9 tracks on 'Balance' are a perfect example for the aesthetics to arise within the Click & Cuts scene and (ambient-)glitch music movement of the late 90s and early 2000s. The two masters of microscopic sounds and sine wave/white noise-based music constructed these seamlessly mixed pieces around rhythms and melodies, which grants the album plenty of dynamics. The wide var…
Abtasten_halten
Faitiche presents a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider's distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations -- all random, without repetition. The album resembles a m…
Con-struct
About the Con-Struct series: Conrad Schnitzler liked to embark on daily excursions through the sonic diversity of his synthesizers. Finding exceptional sounds with great regularity, he preserved them for use in combination with each other in subsequent live performances. He thus amassed a vast sound archive of his discoveries over time. When the m=minimal label in Berlin reissued two Conrad Schnitzler albums at the outset of the 2010s, label honcho Jens Strüver was granted access to this audio …
Plastik / Mechanik
Berlin’s hardcore minimalist Frank Bretschneider tweaks the freqs for Shitkatapult, rolling out pronged stabs and inhuman vocals on the physical electro flow of Plastik, and with head-slapping tones swept up in a sort of drily swanging house vortex with Mechanik. Bretschneider was raised in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) in the German Democratic Republic. He is the founder of the East German underground band AG Geige and co-founder of the Raster-Noton label. He lives as a musician, video artist,…
Lunik
Frank Bretschneider on Lunik: "It moves, it sings... but does it swing? Anyway, it represents the soundtrack of my life, my musical influences: some San Francisco psychedelia, some London underground, some Berlin school (old and new). Krautrock from Cologne and New York minimalism. A shot of Detroit grit, a bit of Moscow dust, a splash of Paris charm? Who knows. It's about daily grind, the passing of time, the change of seasons and relations. Reality and fiction and perception. Biography …
Isolation
Line is proud to present the latest work by Berlin based artist Frank Bretschneider. Renowned for his mastery of rhythmic elements throughout his discography, Bretschneider has set this palette aside for an unexpected and unsettling exploration into sensorial space. Isolation was initially composed in 2012 as part of the installation “Zwei Zellen/Hörgang Bautzen II” by Moritz von Rappard and Thomas Ritschel at the former Stasi prison Bautzen II, in Bautzen, Germany. This notorious prison, …
Suite Nuit
"Considered "lost" for the better part of the past decade, these two live pieces, commissioned for a performance in Berlin, has some unexpected moments for those familiar with these two composers. Steve Roden and Frank Bretschneider blend their strengths of subtle electronics and improvisation, but also bring in some surprisingly conventional beats and rhythms, resulting in an unpredictable, yet diverse and gripping record. The first piece, performed live for the 2004 Suite in Parochial festiva…
Sinn + Form
Raster-Noton co-founder Frank Bretschneider\'s new project Sinn + Form (Meaning and Form) is based on the conflict between the fundamentally chaotic world described by mathematical and physical theories and models (dynamical systems, probability theory, stochastic systems) and the constant human attempt to recognize, describe, predict, control, and change this world. Musically, Bretschneider simulates this concept with a modular synthesizer system, in which various modules produce a consta…
Super.Trigger
Super.Trigger is an absolute trove of percussive tensions and frequency-driven finesse and deals mainly with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm. Frank Bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and its complexity to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. There is a real sense of perpetual evolution and coiled tightness to the pulsating rhythmic programming, while t…
Kippschwingungen
In 2007, Frank Bretschneider was invited to compose music for the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument developed during the 1960’s at the RFZ, the technical center for radio and television of the East German postal service. Built in a limited edition of eight machines total, only three Subharcords (in Vienna, Trondheim and Berlin) are believed to survive to this day. The Subharchord is, broadly defined, a subharmonic sound generator, comparable soundwise to the Mixturtrautonium. It’s sugg…
Status
12k presents Status, the result of two of the genre’s most talented, and diffferent, composers; Frank Bretschneider and Ralph Steinbrüchel, sharing their sounds and styles. Status began in the Spring of 2003 when they designed their own sound sequences and samples and sent the material to each other, waiting and hearing what the other will create out of it. They played this game for nearly 2 years, sending sequences and tracks back and forth until both of them were satisfied with the result.When…
Exp
Raster Noton's rhythmic auteur, Frank Bretschneider, presents his first album in three years, a "music-visual project based on the idea that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music". 'EXP' is an attempt to assimilate the qualities of music, namely rhythm, movement, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure within the visual aspect. The music for the project is arranged from an array of generated and selected waveforms sourced from pure electricity, magnetism, light an…
TESLA WERKTATT KLANGAPPARATE
Four artistic projects concerning historic sound devices from Steve Roden & Martin Riches, Thilges and Frank Bretschneider in a DVD of sound and video performance captured at Tesla in Berlin, 2006
Rhythm
LP version. Probably Bretschneider's most direct, clear and concentrated work yet, ãRhythm' is neither pop nor avant-garde, but deals simply with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm. A combination of programming, composition and construction is connected with his very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound but always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures.