Sundaze 1611

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Today's artist is one of the vital producers in the global electronic network. A member of the raster-noton collective, he also has releases under the names Komet and Produkt. Bretschneider has created some spacial electronics of the late 90's and 00's, unlike so much output in the microscopic music scene, his music has always flourished with activity. Precise sound placement, volume levels and the contrast of tones in Bretschneider's production makes his compositions captivating. Bretschneider goes beyond the plug-in or plug research electronics. He redefins the genre by rendering the parameters playable, reentering the musical domain with unprecedented ease. Bretschneider discovers the complexity of the virtual: microtonality, clicks, complex rhythm textures, melodic fragments.. ....N'Joy

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Frank Bretschneider is a German electronic musician. He works primarily with sine waves and white noise as his source material. He also releases material under the name Komet. Bretschneider (1956) was born and raised in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz since 1990), where his aesthetic developed as he listened to pirate radio and smuggled Beastie Boys tapes in the former East Germany. After studying fine arts and inspired by science fiction radio plays and films he began experimenting with tape machines, synthesizers, and modified guitars in 1984, as well as exploring the possibilities of exchange between visual art and music by various means such as film, video and computer graphics.

In 1986, after establishing his cassette label klangFarBe, Bretschneider founded AG Geige, a successful and influential East German underground band. Though limited to the East before the wall came down, they were invited to perform across Germany and internationally after 1989 and released three albums before splitting in 1993. In 1995, Bretschneider and fellow AG. Geige band member Olaf Bender founded the Rastermusic record label. In 1999 this label merged with Carsten Nicolai's Noton label, to become Raster-Noton. Bretschneider has released material on record labels such as 12k, Raster-Noton, Mille Plateaux, Fällt and Bip Hop.

Most of Bretschneider’s early solo albums - about half a dozen - were under the alias Komet, the first, SAAT, appearing in 1996. Since then Bretschneider has released his work (in addition to raster noton) on various labels including 12k, Line, Mille Plateaux or Shitkatapult, and contributed to some well-known compilations like Clicks & Cuts on Mille Plateaux and raster-noton’s 20' TO 2000 series. 2001’s Curve, his second album for Mille Plateaux, was critically acclaimed and brought Bretschneider international attention. Followed 2003 by Gold, raster-noton’s most blatantly pop album by then. Gold, however, was topped by the percussive masterpiece released in late 2007, Rhythm, an album that was rated very highly by several major electronic music publications, notably »The Wire« magazine, who put the album among their top releases of 2007. 2010 saw the release of EXP, a rather complex and abstract audio-visual work and his 2012 album Kippschwingungen explores the sound of the Subharchord, a unique electronic instrument based on subharmonic sound generation. Super Trigger, his 2013 album for raster-noton, is an absolute trove of percussive tension. And his newest, Sinn + Form, is all about improvisation and analog modular synth chaos.


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No one creates minimal funk better than Frank Bretschneider, aka Komet. Over the course of eight albums under the Komet moniker (and countless other projects under his own name), Bretschneider has created and perfected a wonderfully minimal dance groove aesthetic that relies on sharp snaps, subtle basslines, and red-hot breaks. Anyone who has heard Bretschneider's music will instantly recognize the pulsing clips, the bubbling bass, and the chirpy stabs of Gold.

For all of Gold's uniformly groovy beats, the music here is rather uneven. The first song, "Wheel," is a blistering, spinning kaleidoscope that reminds me of funkier version of the more elliptical songs on Rechenzentrum's Director's Cut. "Weiss," also, is a unique mix of 80s-style drum machine noises and 00s-style clip and clicks. It's an incredibly rich array of complex grooves, and I hear something new each time. By contrast, I've listened to each song on Gold about six times now, and by the fourth listen, I'd heard all there was to hear. There were few surprises or hidden little twitches here and there to keep me enthralled. Bretschneider's a great artist, and anyone with an desire to create IDM or experimental music should listen to his stuff to get an idea how to design interesting, listenable music out of abstract, minimal sounds.

Komet - Gold (flac 253mb)

01 Wheel 6:25
02 Omsk 5:52
03 Two 6:08
04 Blau 7:29
05 Weiss 4:53
06 Left 6:08
07 Twist 5:58
08 Gold 4:44

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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 the minimal 120bpm rhythmic structures of Frank Bretschneider and the austere sonic minimalism of Steinbrüchel get together, a rare piece of atmospheric rythmics is created. Sometimes very melodic, sometimes abstract, sometimes very rhythmic, sometimes nearly pop, and always minimal. Detailed, fragile and full at once Status shows where rhythmic and abstract music can get together, how different sonic worlds combine to create a unique listening experience.

Bretschneider + Steinbruchel - Status  (flac  261mb)

01 Spirale 4:36
02 Antenne 4:08
03 Funktion 4:04
04 Periode 6:06
05 Phase 4:53
06 Spektrum 4:51
07 Basis 7:38
08 Passage 4:07
09 Position 3:55
10 Faktor 4:23
11 Impuls 5:56
12 Frequenz 3:54

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The tenth release in the Brombron series, a co-production between Frans de Waard and Extrapool. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a certain amount of time on a collaborative project; a project they always wished to do, but didn't have the time or the equipment to realize.

Despite working within the rigid templates laid down by the roster of the Raster-Noton crew (he's a founding member). I've always found Frank's work to possess a dancefloor sensibility. On this collaboration with Rotterdam's Peter Duimelinks they take minimalist loops through textural deconstruction. Opener 'Knox' is so groovy, it'll propel you: sub merged bass and short-wave frequencies do battle against rhythmic pointillism. 'Prax' has more than a hint of Pole about it, with its fluttery patterns and weightlessness. In their playing together Bretschneider and Duimelinks go back to the core of minimal, click related techno music, to the early days of Komet and Goem. Minimal but engaging music, always with the heartbeat pulse at the bottom. My only complaint? It all runs far too short at just over 30 minutes.

Bretschneider + Duimelinks - Fflux  (flac  163mb)

01 Interlock 6:15
02 Moving Light 5:45
03 Dug In 5:09
04 Vertical Invader 5:25
05 Freeze Frame 4:15
06 Autodrive 4:31
07 Concrete 5:26
08 Half-Mute 4:42
09 Bluetime 4:29

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Rhythm is neither pop nor avant-garde, but deals simply with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm. Frank Bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and it’s complexity, to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. The terseness and precision of previous works remains, as well as a preference for high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone. New is the assemblage of the material. A combination of programming, composition and construction, which draws a clear distinction to his preferred loop-based work on foregone albums, is connected with Bretschneider's very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound: controlled and objective. The whole follows simple mechanical states: on/off, forward/backward, up/down, slow/fast, loud/quiet, dull/brilliant, soft/hard and is characterized by the absence of any romanticism. Still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the music to dance-floor functionality, instead Bretschneider always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to generate a surplus of funk. In all, Rhythm is probably Bretschneider’s most direct, clear and concentrated work yet.

Frank Bretschneider - Rhythm (flac 229mb)

01 A Soft Throbbing Of Time 7:46
02 The Big Black And White Game 5:31
03 We Can Remember It For You Wholesale 3:50
04 The Eight Day People 3:04
05 Other Days, Other Eyes 4:10
06 Construction Shack 4:11
07 The Moon Is A Hole In The Sky 6:54
08 All Summer In A Day 3:12
09 The October Game 2:45

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A master at work -- that's the best way to sum up the music on Exp. Here, electro-glitch master Frank Bretschneider clicks and cuts his way through 35 itsy-bitsy pieces (none over three minutes, many under one). Each one is a careful work of quasi-beat layering and hollow texture weaving. The music is highly abstract but lively, rhythm-based but hardly danceable in a normal fashion (or with the regular number of limbs). As an audio journey, Exp is a thrilling ride with hardly a bump into it and, even though it clocks in at only 35 minutes, it would be entirely satisfying as is. However, the project also includes a strong visual component in the form of an extra data cd featuring an 18-minute experimental animation film by Bretschneider. After spending a while under the radar (his previous title for the revered experimental electronic music label Raster-Noton was released in 2007) -- and at the same moment the clicks-and-cuts movement's flagship label Mille Plateaux has been resurrected -- Frank Bretschneider sends us all a reminder as to why he should be considered one of that aesthetic's pioneers and major representatives

Frank Bretschneider - Exp (flac 161mb)

01 Monopuls 2:01
02 Blue: Cobalt 0:39
03 Strobe Room 1:00
04 Blue: Ultramarine 1:31
05 Chamber Jazz 1:05
06 Biplex 1:03
07 Blue: Cyan 0:38
08 B.L.U.E. (Best Linear Unbiased Estimator) 1:04
09 Polylog 1:12
10 Node 0:32
11 Orion 0:48
12 Spin 0:20
13 Novo Duplex 0:35
14 Blue: Electric 0:22
15 Mass 1:06
16 Blue: Aluminate 0:42
17 Ventilator 1:01
18 Colour Wheel 0:31
19 Tron 0:31
20 Echolog 1:05
21 Reflex 0:50
22 Multimath Duplex 0:21
23 Polycopter 2:55
24 Memory 1:47
25 Phased Out 0:41
26 Oscillation 0:14
27 Funkalogic 0:37
28 Monoplex 0:14
29 Multiplex 0:29
30 Panback 0:37
31 Blue: Prussian 0:30
32 Light Weight 0:48
33 Satellite 2:13
34 Crystal Dub 2:49
35 For Kyoka 2:29

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