We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.
supported by
crunas
crunas thumbnail
/
1.
Magnification 13:46
buy track
2.
Inverse Pentagram 07:26
buy track
3.
Robot Aesthetics 05:40
buy track
4.
Major Dominator 06:59
buy track
5.
Worm Up 03:52
buy track
6.
Simple Life Forms 05:29
buy track

about

All improvised music.

Zooming in from far away, the Nano Brothers take the wonderful world of music under the magnifying glass. Well-trained, but without choreography, they simply get started, and their power lies in real time. In front of the audience’s ears, they find beauty, abysses and, in doing so, reveal quite a lot about themselves. The way they play has proven to be very exciting and repeatedly elicits enthusiastic reactions from the audience.

Wolf Kampmann 2015:
"A conversation is always good when you can zoom in, without consciously realizing how something large can be pictured in ever smaller pieces. From the macro cosmos one enters the micro zone, and from there penetrates into nano worlds, each itself a new cosmos. Here, time does not matter because the seconds behave like years – it’s all a matter of deep experience. The first CD of the Nano Brothers Echtzeit [Real Time] acts just like this.

The Nano Brothers are a duo from Cologne. Jürgen Friedrich plays the piano, Johannes Ludwig the saxophone. Both are masters of quiet dialogue and intuitively calculated detail. Thus, almost everything has already been said because everything else opens up from their playing. The two musicians enter into a conversation in which they let the listener participate. This conversation is as open-ended as a conversation between mother and child, as two old friends over a glass of beer or two twelve-year olds who, while playing, effortlessly take on the identity of their heroes.

The music on Echtzeit is reminiscent of the nature of a fern leaf, which at first reveals itself to the eye in its overall shape. But just as one aims the zoom on the structure of each part of the leaf, one suddenly finds a thousand new miniature fern leaves and on and on. Jürgen Friedrich and Johannes Ludwig exchange in a dialog that spans a great narrative arc, and yet it is composed of countless melodic rich microelements, each of which has a narrative justification for itself. “Behind the logo of the Nano Brothers there is the maxim that we are working with tiny ideas and building Lego-like worlds from them,” Jürgen Friedrich explains how the duo works.

The forces that hold all this together are repetition and variation. One adapts to these dialogues very quickly. The system, however, does not rely on the usual call-and-response formula that is drawn out in so-called free jazz which uses a sequence of solos, but each utterance is issued in the state of internalized listening. Friedrich and Ludwig ensnare each other with a delicate attention that leaves the listener enough space to share in their conversation with his or her own associations. The effect of this kind of musical conversation is that you can listen to this CD endlessly and penetrate into ever new levels of sensory perception and associative participation.

As in any real good conversation, the content also quickly takes on its own dynamics, which can lead one far away from the original intention. When playing as well as listening. This principle is called freedom, for whoever opens up to all possibilities allows everything to happen. The Nano Brothers work partly with code words, which are also reflected in the titles. One of these code words was “Nano Robots.” Jürgen Friedrich says, “There are really nano robots that can move imperceptible to the human eye. We imagine that we are nano robots who, each according to his own programmed code, can access the respective musical chunks and make something meaningful from them. Each has his own approach and can rely on the approach of the other. This image provides us with a way of playing this piece.”

Here, improvisation is not an end in itself, but is a necessity born from the spontaneous moment, one which also allows expressions that do not sound improvised. Friedrich and Ludwig do not, per se, come from freely improvised music, but rather open up more and more towards improvisation in front of a background filled with jazz and classical music, melody and harmony. That makes their music, in spite of all its abstraction, so tangible."

credits

released September 18, 2015

Recorded at home by Nano Brothers. Mixed by Oli Bergner.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Johannes Ludwig image

Johannes Ludwig Germany

Johannes Ludwig is a German sax player and composer. He originates from the contemporary jazz idiom but keeps expanding his interest towards all different kinds of music, which reflects on his growing output as a bandleader, composer and instrumentalist.
Check his websites for dates and more info. ... more

contact / help

Contact Johannes Ludwig

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Echtzeit, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featured guests are the golden-voiced Baby Rose and psyche soulsters Brainstory.
listen now