BRUEDER SELKE (CEEYS)
electronic chamber music from the Plattenbau

“It’s an extraordinary piece of music. It’s the work of two brothers, Sebastian on cello and Daniel on piano. I saw them premiere tracks from their new album at a gig that I went to in Berlin. This is a project which is written about the buildings that surrounded them in their childhood, growing up on the streets of East Berlin.”
Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC Radio 6 Music

“… they explore texture – creaking strings, bashed wood, triple stopping – over minimal one-chord drones with a horror-movie intensity.”
John Lewis, The Guardian

Introduction

The award-winning East Berlin-born, Potsdam-based, polyinstrumental composer duo Brueder Selke – with Sebastian Selke on cello and his brother Daniel Selke on piano – is continuously expanding their repertoire, complemented with an electronic hardware-based setup. Further, as independent curators, the brothers also regularly present together their own concert formats.

The work of this long-standing duo collaboration is based on a profound yet easily comprehensible bilateral approach that emerges from both the polar and complementary interplay of two autonomous musicians.

They imaginatively combine through improvisation divergent, dynamic styles – from classical to contemporary compositions, intimate to expansive performances – with their childhood memories from the time of the Wende in East Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s. In this way, they search for comparable historical events and find many parallels in our daily interactions with one another today.

So it is that the brothers are able to convey with their purely instrumental music visions for a universal duality in which seemingly contradictory elements interact, complement each other compositionally, and ultimately find their balance.

Beginnings

Classically trained and with a growing interest in contemporary ideas, Sebastian and Daniel Selke, initially under the alias CEEYS, began an ongoing musical narrative about their upbringing in the former GDR, as well as the – in the broadest sense – associated architectural and social landscapes that have shaped them as musicians and people.

Brueder Selke: “We share personal memories of a world divided into East and West by a physical wall, as well as our impressions of Europe’s largest Plattenbausiedlung (prefabricated housing development) during that historically and emotionally charged, conflict-ridden time.”

On the one hand driven by a natural intuition acquired as children in GDR times and developed over the years, and on the other hand motivated by a deep-rooted longing for encounter and exchange, their first releases were shaped by their early environment and thus soon became a product of both the old and modern worlds. The work was marked by a need to explore memories – both before and after the fall of the socialist regime – and to apply these historical lessons to contemporary music.

Classical & Contemporary

Utilising their knowledge of vibrant textures and repeating structures in minimalist, pattern-based songwriting, the Selke brothers create a experimental yet accessible tonality of manipulated acoustic and electronic music between avant-garde and pop which intelligently incorporates spontaneous and prepared organic and synthetic elements of impressionistic chamber music & free jazz, subtle ambient music & refined retro-wave tracks, as well as cinematic soundscapes & complex field recordings and complex noise.

The brothers’ music reflects the myriad sounds they have encountered in their lives, from Johann Sebastian Bach & Claude Debussy to Arvo Pärt & Philip Glass.

The work of East-German rock group City and the synthesizer duo Key ultimately inspired them to take their first stage name, CEEYS.

They were equally fascinated by the work of artists such as Frank Bretschneider and Carsten Niccolai, who with their fluid crossover between complexly interwoven rhythmic structures and strict reductionism, as well as their analytical view of individual elements, explore the intersection between music, art, and science.

Further, they also feel an affinity toward the approach of the brothers Robert and Ronald Lippok, whose work on electronic instruments that were difficult to obtain in the GDR and often had to be borrowed or converted from existing equipment was driven by their love of experimentation. And it wasn’t just because of the lack of materials, they also deliberately positioned themselves against the prevailing rock aesthetic.

Duologies

After a series of reworks in which Sebastian and Daniel reinterpreted the music of Peter Broderick, Ólafur Arnalds, and Nils Frahm as cello-piano pieces, the duo released their impressive debut on 1631 Recordings as CEEYS, entitled “The Grunewald Church Session” (27.05.2016, DL & 11.02.2022, MC).

In its seamless form, the album reflects a series of loose, hazy memories of the brothers’ early childhood.

With their follow-up physical album “Concrete Fields” (24.02.2017, CD|DL|LP), recorded at Vox-Ton Studio in Berlin by Francesco Donadello and Antonio Pulli and also released on 1631, they returned to their musical roots “in the real socialism” of 1980s East Germany.

“Wænde” (11.05.2018, CD|DL|LP), the third album and their debut on Neue Meister is dedicated to their personal feelings surrounding the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – the Wende.

Drawing upon historical aspects, the Selke brothers also share anecdotes about the creation process of their first collaborative pieces, which were written in a socialist Plattenbau (prefabricated housing block).

The walls of their rooms, deliberately not soundproofed by the builders in order to save on costs and make eavesdropping easier, paradoxically helped the brothers, who initially practised separately in their twelve-square-metre bedrooms, to find their way to each other.

The release concert for the record, which, like “Concrete Fields” and later “Hiddensee”, also featured photographs of this particular Plattenbau, took place in May 2018 in a historically fitting setting in the legendary Saal 4 of the former GDR Funkhaus Berlin.

Their fourth album – the second on Neue Meister – is dedicated to their humble childhood El Dorado “Hiddensee” (14.06.2019, CD|DL|LP), a small island in the Baltic Sea that was already very popular with East Germans in GDR times.

After the fall of the “Iron Curtain”, their newly won freedom to finally explore the world took the Selke brothers far beyond the borders of their homeland before finally bringing them back at the end of the 1990s to their geographical roots, with gratitude and nostalgia, to once again find inspiration in their childhood.

The record is marked by a strikingly cheerful modesty and humility rooted in the memory of the daily necessity of dealing with the shortages of GDR reality as best they could and overcoming them creatively.

As with “Wænde”, motifs of new beginnings are also evident in “Hiddensee”, reflecting the characteristic paradigms of the late 1980s and 1990s in East Germany.

With the aim of integrating authentic sound into a complex recording process, they accepted the invitation of Grammy award-winning sound engineer Antonio Pulli to return once more to the Funkhaus.

The album was recorded onto tape in Saal 3, Nils Frahm’s impressive Leiter Studio, an inspirational environment full of unique echo chambers and analogue treasures.

And so the “familial” significance of the Funkhaus for their work further deepened – Blocks A and B of the building were where their father once worked as an editor and radio host.

These four “incognito” albums are built around the past, but they serve not only to create an anonymous narrative of the brothers’ first steps, centred on the for many even today still sensitive topic of German division and later reunification. They also portray the constant melodic search for balance and harmony in their long-term collaboration as a duo, a dialogue that was not yet concluded.

And so the following double LP “Hausmusik” (09.10.2020, CD|DL|LP), again on Neue Meister, expanded artistically the anthology once more. Here, the brothers raise their distinctive setup to a new level, eschewing the use of synthesizers and effects altogether and shaping the sound only through the possibilities of their main instruments: cello and piano. “Hausmusik” reveals itself as a step back into a purely acoustic world and denotes a calm and humble dynamic mood.

Brueder Selke: “This album is built around the notion of balance and functions as an extension of our unspoken communicative fusion of musical minds, and in being set in a contemporary environment for the first time, it becomes a template for all future works and projects.”

The carefully curated reworks on the following album “Musikhaus” (29.10.21, DL|LP) on Neue Meister are a cleverly considered mirroring and opening up from the original intimacy of the duo-based “Hausmusik” release. The record brought together Pascal Schumacher, Thor Harris, Midori Hirano, Marina Baranova, David Allred, Simon Goff, Arnold Kasar, Ben Lukas Boysen, Mara Simpson, and Hoshiko Yamane, and was mastered by the wonderful Mandy Parnell at Black Saloon Studios.

In their communality, this duology also offers a calm counterpoint to the pandemic restrictions and social distancing of the early 2020s.

After these six CEEYS albums and the MC release via boutique label Oscarson of their 2016 debut “The Grunewald Church Session” in early 2022, there followed an album which, in its instrumentation and production style, can be seen as a turning point in the collaboration of the brothers as a duo.

Here, the two longstanding musical partners present for the first time an album as a piano duo with virtual string quartet, and under their family name as Brueder Selke: “Marienborn” (11.11.2022, CD|DL|LP).

The album is named after the former border checkpoint which is today a memorial. And just as the former checkpoint ultimately made crossing between the two German states possible, so the album seeks with its delicate, purposefully placed textures, minimalistic figures, and an intimately rooted sensibility to address and overcome ideas of separation and division.

Musically, the album is primarily based on a selection of special samples from a library that the two brothers were commissioned to produce by Canadian content provider LandR.

The second sample pack of the series, “Prepared Piano”, is centred around two pianos from Daniel’s childhood.

One was built in the former GDR by Alexander Hermann at VEB Deutsche Piano Union Leipzig and is here damped with a moderator and felt.

The other piano was made by the company Steck, a sub-brand of Aeolian Piano, of which a large number were produced in Gotha, also in East Germany.

The piano loops were first meticulously composed and recorded in the brothers’ Klingenthal Studio in Potsdam, then edited and recombined for the album.

Coupled with a keen sense of asymmetrical rhythmic structures and tempos from electronic music, a series of dual effects such as ping-pong delay, a stereo spring reverb, and a sequenced analogue filter was used before finally travelling through a quartet of legendary, meticulously restored RFZ preamps.

The entire work process follows, on the one hand, the aesthetics of analogue recordings, and on the other, in the postproduction and editing, the In-The-Box techniques of digital production.

The layering of different phrases allows the two pianos to freely merge and sound like one instrument.

In addition to the pianos, textures from a virtual string quartet can be heard which were masterfully created by Ólafur Arnalds and Viktor Orri Árnason for Spitfire Audio, and in which Sebastian played the cello part.

A finely gauged backdrop of subtle pedal noises from the pianos, fingers only grazing the strings, and last but not least, the soft framing drones of the string quartet positions the album between intimacy and expansiveness.

“Go East” (23.11.2023, DL|MC) followed on Aimée Portioli aka Grand River’s (Spazio Disponibile/ Mego/ Ghostly/ Umor Rex) concept-driven One Instrument label, with meditative improvised drones on restored keyboard instruments from Vermona such as a legendary stringmachine, the electronic organ ET 6-1, the combo organ Sandy, and an electronic piano called simply: E-Piano.

This unique album was presented together with a visualisation by the remarkable Marco Ciceri, based on a series of GDR mosaics in Potsdam.

Next came “Belka & Strelka” (24.11.2023, CD|DL|LP), inspired by the legendary space flight of the two eponymous Russian space dogs and recorded at an intimate session in Dresden’s “Jazzclub Tonne”.

“Stimmen in Prague” (22.11.2024, CD|DL|LP) completed the second part of this duology.

Here, the brothers accepted an invitation to the legendary festival “Spectaculare” in the Czech Republic’ capital city.

The visit to the Palác Akropolis became for the brothers, who grew up in the real existing Socialism of the GDR, more than just a performance in the eastern hemisphere.

It also brought to the surface curious parallels to their own past – both the familiar architecture of the modular Plattenbaus and the socialist brutalist monuments that remain very present there as here.

They remember too the cheerful/pensive reactions of the Czech concert audience who were able to bring to the night their personal and collective historical experiences.

Brueder Selke: “The completion of the two duologies under our family name underscores our deeply internalised and playful search for our own origins and identities in relation to each other in a concert setting… and simultaneously in partnership with our audience… The names of the two albums form the bilingual phrase: Belka & Strelka stimmen in Prague.”

The Selke brothers’ entire back catalogue can thus be divided into duologies:

“The Grunewald Church Session” & “Concrete Fields”

– from sketchy childhood fragments to memories of the 1980s

“Wænde” & “Hiddensee”

– the historic Wende of 1989 and the vague 1990s

“Hausmusik” & “Musikhaus”

– the present, intimately as a chamber music duo, and an opening up with reworks by like-minded musicians

“Marienborn” & “Go East”

– the GDR border crossing as a new beginning and socialist keyboard instruments

“Belka & Strelka” & “Stimmen in Prague”

– two space dogs and people with common histories

Collaborative Paths

Brueder Selke: “Kollektivarbeit (collective work) has become a very familiar word to us, and an essential element of our creative process.”

A prime example is their 2020 EP “Thesis 17” (02.04.2020, DL|LP) as CEEYS alongside Constant Presence, a duo project from Peter Broderick and Daniel O’Sullivan, part of Gregory Euclide’s “Thesis Project”, in which both duos engage with the Zen teachings of Shunryu Suzuki (1905–1971).

The contribution from the brothers is titled “Nothing Special” and has a track length of 11 minutes. The 10-inch vinyl with elaborate artwork was released in early 2020.

For the project “Zero Crossing” (11.12.2020, DL|MC) they produced with the New York artist Eric Maltz two soundscapes and released it through Eric’s record label Flower Myth.

Brueder Selke: “A point is infinite. When a waveform crosses the zero point, the exact moment of its transformation from one polarity to another only takes a fraction of a blink of an eye – or it lasts until the end of time… Waves in suspension, the magnification of an instant. These pieces exist in a timeframe that is simultaneously fixed and expanding. This waveform has two sides. The first is us, Brueder Selke, the second side is Eric Maltz… Both sides worked together here and created the parts in their own rooms, their own studios, and allowed the combination to happen in the space between. Dreamlike melodies unfold in a languid, smoky tempo and pulse in and out… Each enjoys their freedom, the full duration of their existence, to expand and unfold as they choose, without structure, time or place. These sounds have never existed anywhere else. Only at the Zero Crossing.”

With “Spiegelpunkte” (29.03.2024, DL|MC) the Selke brothers meet new friends from Canada. Houses Of Worship is a group made up of two solo projects: Eric Quach as Thisquietarmy and Jim Demos as Hellenica, both originally from Montreal and experimenting with music for many years.

So it was easy for the four colleagues to find their common Spiegelpunkt (point of symmetry). Two almost 20-minute tracks in which synthesizer, guitar, cello, and piano meet, enter into dialog, and together develop a symbiosis. Although the album could not be recorded live in one room, they created in this way a shared “secret desertscape in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere between Potsdam and Montreal”.

“Split Scale” (24.01.2025, CD|DL|LP) is the brothers' debut with Midori Hirano.

It brings together artists who share not only inimitable skill and depth of expression but also a background in the classical tradition while practising at the cutting edge of contemporary music.

Midori Hirano's mastery of sound design has made her a sought-after composer in film and television. Her works include the soundtracks to “All or Nothing” and “Tokito”.

The group’s first album together follows a series of live collaborations.

The artists chose a simple concept that follows a Western scale from the beginning to the end, creating a suite of sublime, synaesthetic soundscapes and cinematic movements.

The vibrant tapestry of sound and colour is luminous and rich in emotion. The immediacy and emotional power of “Split Scale” belies the very precise process of its creation.

The group began by dividing among themselves the notes of the musical scale, from A to G and back to A, using each as a starting point and tonal foundation for a piece on the album, and then dividing the pieces evenly, with Midori beginning one half and the Selkes initiating the other half.

The album was then refined by way of the artists swapping their pieces and each working on the piece as if they were in dialogue with the other person.

The pieces were meticulously edited with a focus on the subtle changes to the tonality, turning the simple premise into a touching exploration of mood and atmosphere.

Midori Hirano: “I feel that this naturally became like one piece of music, as if we were climbing up a long, colourful staircase.”

The album has a distinctly “live” feel, even though the individual tracks were assembled bit by bit in different studios.

Brueder Selke: “To keep the soundscape tight and organic, several instruments and devices were played simultaneously. Sebastian, for example, supported his cello passages with a synthesizer that enriched the sub-bass range, while Daniel built mechanical arpeggio runs on another synthesizer that are almost unplayable by humans, then juxtaposed them with his natural piano playing.”

The more leisurely pieces were composed with graceful melancholy and curiosity, at times lavishly exploring individual colour tones or gradients, all of which originate from the tonal core.

A parallel to Newton's thesis on the colour wheel also plays into this, in which each note is assigned its own colour on the musical scale.

The conversation between the artists begins with the opener “A”, with Hirano's cyclical arpeggios feeling out the space and Brueder Selke adding subtle noise and texture with washes of smudged cello and synthesizer effects.

On “C”, the artists trade roles: Hirano's rippling electronics rise like a heat haze before shapes begin slowly to coalesce with Sebastian and Daniel tracing the outline of this landscape with tremolo and soft keys.

The concluding “AA” forms the final step of the cycle with one of the album's most explicitly electronic moments, rising into the sky with pulsating, prismatic chords before dissolving into the astral atmosphere.

“Split Scale” touches on the foundational experiences of many Western musicians with respect to the sound of the equal-tempered scale.

Brueder Selke: “We have in a sense travelled back in time, back to our beginnings... Our choice of sounds was relatively simple, intuitive, almost child's play… We wanted to make the most of this unique opportunity with Midori to collectively ‘start from scratch’ – a great experience and thrilling too.”

And so “Split Scale” proves itself to be an album born of collective experience and mastery of instrumentation and arrangement, and manages to convey a dazzling sense of wonder, as when playing an instrument for the first time and really hearing it.

The collaboration celebrated its premiere with a meditative performance in August 2025 in the Galiläakirche in Berlin, close to Sebastian & Daniel’s old music school in Friedrichshain.

Curation

Ultimately it is encounter and exchange with like-minded friends and artists like Midori Hirano, Peter Broderick, Laura Cannell, Mabe Fratti, Andrea Belfi, Grand River, Robert Ames, Hélène Vogelsinger, Yair Elazar Glotman, James Heather, Echo Collective, Poppy Ackroyd, Jules Reidy, Masayoshi Fujita, Carlos Cipa, Aidan Baker, Hania Rani, and Ale Hop that inspired Brueder Selke to develop their own concert formats.

And so in 2016 the idea for the now legendary Q3Ambientfest was born, which, financed by themselves, took place for the first time in 2017 and celebrated its eighth edition in 2024.

Faithful to their artistic approach, Sebastian & Daniel invite good friends and renowned colleagues in a spirit of openness across musical genres to meet them on a common stage and also to foster new talent.

They thus bring a multifaceted world of sound to the world-famous UNESCO City of Film Potsdam and create a connection to its equally eclectic architecture, which spans from neoclassical palaces to socialist Plattenbau. It was, after all, these GDR buildings that gave Q3A its name.

On the occasion of the 1000th anniversary of Cologne’s Basilica of the Holy Apostles, Q3A collaborated with the Ambient Festival there by digitally projecting a live Hauschka concert from Cologne onto a screen in the famous Zionskirche, the former dissident stronghold in Berlin, and presenting it together with a performance by Alvin Lucier’s “The Ever Present Orchestra” and a set from Brueder Selke themselves.

This extraordinary musical event is supported by international media partners, independent music initiatives, progressive record labels, instrument makers, underground radio stations, investigative art magazines, forward-thinking blogs, and alternative concert formats from around the world.

Q3A is part of Keychange, an international campaign run by the PRS Foundation and supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme. In addition, Q3A was sponsored by the Brandenburg state capital Potsdam.

Further events include:

Kosmoskonzerte (2017–2023)

– co-curated house concerts at the Rechenzentrum

Flimmerkonzerte (2018–2021)

– silent-film concerts at the Filmmuseum

Novemberstimmung (since 2019)

– a nomadic format in changing locations

Haus2konzerte (2021-2023)

– house concerts at freiLand

Solo

In addition to their releases as a duo, numerous collaborations, the curation of diverse concert formats, and other cross-genre interdisciplinary projects, Sebastian and Daniel also dedicate themselves to their respective solo work.

Proceeding from the everyday material and ideational shortages in the former GDR and driven by their deep-rooted need to improvise, the two soloists experiment not only with cello and piano, but also with other, sometimes antiquarian, socialist and Soviet-manufactured instruments.

On their 2019 EP “Q3A” (29.03.2019 DL|EP), they combined for the first time in an impressive and original way their long-standing musical communality with their equally strong artistic individuality.

While each presents a solo piece on the EP, it is the thickness of the record alone that separates the brothers. When the two tracks are layered over each other, a hidden third emerges.

The physical 7-inch EP was released by master papermaker and designer Matthias Rehling on Oscarson, his label that Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), David Allred (w/ Peter Broderick), and Brigid Mae Power also occasionally call home.

On “Q3A”, Sebastian and Daniel saw a welcome opportunity to explore the components of their shared sonic signature individually and in detail.

On “An Daniel” you can hear Sebastian complementing his acoustic cello with two elements of handmade analogue technology: a classic monophonic synthesizer for the bass and a handy percussion synthesizer focussed on kicks, made by Elektroakustische Manufaktur in Erlbach, a town in Saxony’s so-called “Musikwinkel” (Music Corner).

A digital delay (DD-20) in ping-pong mode and a sequenced analogue filter from Bob Moog, the synthesizer legend from the East Coast of the USA, compellingly advance the brothers’ approach.

Brueder Selke: “The subtle use of the two handmade synthesizers and the rhythmic stereo effect once again express the fascination Sebastian feels when investigating these – for us so fundamental – dualistic, almost philosophical, notions.”

Daniel himself plays his restored childhood piano on the B-side along with a wind synthesizer on a track titled “For Sebastian”.

This extraordinary voice-, breath- and mouth-controlled dynamic effect processor and synthesizer was developed by Ukrainian radio engineer and musician Vlad Kreimer who later emigrated to Russia.

Following their penchant for unusual combinations, these elements are edited and mixed with modern-day echo, tremolo and filter effects – allowing past and present to communicate and merge once more.

The brothers also use barely audible field recordings and sounds made on portable tape recorders their father once used for his work on radio plays on DDR-Runkfunk (GDR Radio).

“Q3A” was the first part of a solo duology, and after working on the solo aspects of the duo, part two “QP” (11.06.2021, DL|EP) was released in 2021.

While the hidden layering effect of part one was similarly adopted here, this was the first time that virtual, sample-based sounds from their recordings for LandR and Spitfire Audio were used.

Klingenthal Studio

In their own Klingenthal Studio, Brueder Selke uses a well-maintained Studer 962, a portable, wood-frame analogue console made in the 1980s in the once unreachable West.

In addition, there is a collection of restored microphones, like the CMV563 with M7 capsule, spring reverb systems, keyboard instruments, and rhythm boxes – audio technology that was originally made between the 1950s and 1980s, came from former Eastern Bloc manufacturers, or with some other personal connection to the brothers’ overall concept.

Their listening environment too is bespoke and based on loudspeakers from Geithain and RFT, a manufacturer's association of various telecommunications companies in the GDR.

Brueder Selke: “In the studio we’ve placed our trust for many years now in a pair of RL940s by Geithain. In the living room, we use the audio system 3930 with phono, cassette deck and tuner… The system has an amplifier, an integrated mixer with equalizer, while the turntable uses the iconic Tesla VM2103 sampling system.”

The audio system is either connected to the newly installed BR25 or brute Vermona “Regent” speakers.

The BR25 is a 2-way hi-fi bass reflex speaker which pioneered a completely new generation of loudspeaker boxes in the GDR.

VEB Musikelektronik Geithain was the first manufacturer to develop such a speaker that was completely based on experience and technology from the studio sector.

Their furniture was designed by an East Berlin cardboard manufacturer.

Brueder Selke: “One of the shelves where we store all our records is made of flexible and recyclable cardboard… In the GDR, people even used this material to build bodies for cars like the once-coveted and still famous ‘Trabant’ – the car was also known as ‘racing cardboard’!”

Brueder Selke

Since 2020, Sebastian and Daniel have been releasing music under the name “Brueder Selke”, using their real surname. They released a rework of “Fishermen” by Alev Lenz on Spitfire Audio, which received high praise from the composer, and in 2021 they presented “QP” on 7-inch vinyl. Several tracks from their 2022 double piano album “Marienborn” had already found their way pre-release onto some prestigious playlists.

In 2020, during the process of producing the album, Brueder Selke also discovered an interesting niche within music production: the recording of samples, thanks to the innovative Canadian content provider and audio technology pioneer LandR, an AI-driven creative platform for musicians. Even the name of the company was a good fit for the brothers’ concept, as it stands for “Left and Right”, the two stereo channels. For a product line, they were able to build up in short time a unique library based on their collection of restored GDR synthesizers, which was released as “Soviet Era Synthesizers”. This was followed by “Prepared Piano”, a sample pack of two prepared pianos from Daniel’s childhood.

It did not take long for these first releases in a widening artistic range to find their place among the complete spectrum of the brothers’ longstanding, fruitful collaboration. From their studio work to live performances, it testifies to a real interest in historical events and stories from everyday life.

Art

In the meantime, Brueder Selke has begun work on their first volume of art and music, “Notation”, based on acoustic versions of their repertoire.

Alongside the sheet music for their pieces, the pictures in rectangular format from their 2015 “Betonfelder” photo series will now also be published; the photos in square format can already be found on their record covers. In the series, a socialist Plattenbau common in GDR times is thoughtfully examined and gently captured on film.

A winding brutalist labyrinth, confusing, anonymous, with countless stereotypical rows of balconies, giant mosaics – and here and there a cat on the windowsill.

The photographs were taken with an original Zeiss Ikon and a Reflekta II camera under professional guidance from the photographer Anne Krausz, then digitised, and form the visual component of almost all their releases.

For example, the cover of “Hiddensee”, stylistically a kind of travel album, shows this same apartment block from an ambiguous angle, resembling both a dynamic ship’s bow and a mountain to be overcome.

An interdisciplinary exhibition and installation of this extraordinary series of photographs, film and music in its entirety took place for the first time in summer 2024 in collaboration with the OKeV at Kunstwerk Gallery in Potsdam.

In other areas too the two artists have always been involved in the visual realisation of their musical narratives, such as their work on the special edition of “Hiddensee”, limited to 100 copies, each including 12 printed postcards, corresponding to the number of tracks on the album.

These cards were produced with a risograph printer and show stills of the island of Hiddensee from a home video from 1986.

While the video was filmed with an AG8 handheld camera from Czechoslovakia, the environmentally friendly risographs came from the Far East – from Japan.

The interlocking approach of the Selke brothers follows a sincere idea to which both remain deeply committed: the search for harmony between the musical profession and our all-encompassing human existence – in art that tangibly enriches life and society.

The brothers live in the balance of the elements in their multifaceted, interdisciplinary works.

Echo

Encouraged from preschool age to play music by their parents, actress Gabriele Selke and radio journalist Harald Selke, after high school both brothers studied music, Sebastian at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin and Daniel at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig.

Today Sebastian works as co-principal cellist with the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg, while Daniel is, among other things, director of the Ernst Busch Choir and lecturer of piano and chamber music at the Municipal Music School “Johann Sebastian Bach” in Potsdam.

Since 2020 they have taken up the role of musical directors of the former Schaffrath Kammerorchester Berlin (1989), now renamed as their own “Hausorchester”.

Alongside classical works, they also perform contemporary pieces and their own compositions.

Their abstract yet subtle compositions regularly receive outstanding praise from the press, fellow musicians and audiences alike. BBC Radio 6 Music host Mary Anne Hobbs spoke after the premiere of pieces at a concert in Berlin of “an extraordinary piece of music”, and The Guardian reported a “horror-movie intensity”.

After hearing “Belka & Strelka”, Richard Allen of the legendary blog and home of instrumental and experimental music “A Closer Listen” wrote: “Everything here is appealing, from the concept to the cover to the visual and aural execution.”

After Nyshka Chandran (Resident Advisor, Vice) selected a song from “Split Scale”, Shawn Reynaldo of First Floor wrote a long review of the album in his newsletter:

“In a time when so much of the new ambient music being released is decidedly smudgy, Split Scale—a new collaborative full-length from German duo Brueder Selke and Berlin- based Japanese composer Midori Hirano—offers a refreshing reminder that blurry doesn’t necessarily mean better. The album’s clean lines and shining sound palette can be traced, at least in part, to the fact that everyone involved is a classically trained musician, and that background also fed the album’s conceptual backbone, as each track uses a different note (e.g. A, B, C, etc.) as a starting point and ‘tonal foundation.’ Admittedly, the intricacies and implications of that process likely fly over the head of most listeners, myself included, but what matters is that Hirano and the Selke brothers have crafted some elegant, and rather beautiful, music… Most striking is LP closer ‘Scale AA’, which pairs free-floating synth arpeggios with stately piano strikes and soft waves of cello. Meditative without being tedious and academic without being impenetrable, it’s a quietly dazzling composition.”

After Brueder Selke's musical accompaniment to photographer Adam Sevens' exhibition, the Minister for Science, Research and Culture of the state of Brandenburg Dr Manja Schüle posted enthusiastically: “Just impossible to capture the atmosphere of a Brueder Selke performance in a mobile phone video. You have to hear and experience them live.”

Brueder Selke’s releases and pieces can be found on independent and renowned labels such as Thrill Jockey, 1631 Recordings, Oscarson, One Instrument, Neue Meister, 7K!, Lady Blunt Records, Bigo & Twigetti, Flower Myth, Erased Tapes, Piano & Coffee Records, Spitfire Audio, LandR, Blwbck Records, Leiter Verlag, and Gregory Euclide’s “Thesis Project”.

Their compositions have often and unmistakably featured in local and international documentaries and on discerning television programmes and in films, for example on the German crime series “Tatort”, as well as on theatre stages (such as with the South African company and methodology Empatheatre), and in collaborations with contemporary dance companies.

Recently, almost their entire discography was used on the four-part Arte documentary “Projekt Aufklärung” (Project Enlightenment), an in-depth look at the historic turning point in human history.

The brothers can be found on high-profile playlists, radio shows and streaming platforms worldwide, as CEEYS and also as Brueder Selke.

Their entire back catalogue is available digitally worldwide, as well as physically either on CD or LP, and, with “Zero Crossing”, “The Grunewald Church Session” and “Go East”, on MC.

While “The Grunewald Church Session” & “Concrete Fields” are distributed digitally through Decca Publishing, “Wænde”, “Hiddensee”, “Hausmusik”, “Musikhaus”, “Marienborn”, “Go East”, “Belka & Strelka”, “Stimmen in Prague”, and “Split Scale” are looked after by Kick The Flame in Leipzig. Their two music books “Notation 1” and “Notation 2” will be published by Berlin publisher Ries & Erler.

Collaborations with renowned fellow musicians, labels, audio engineering companies, and orchestras have been preserved on numerous productions.

These include Ólafur Arnalds & Spitfire Audio, Peter Broderick & Daniel O’Sullivan as Constant Presence, Erased Tapes’ 10th anniversary box set “1+1=X” with Kiasmos, Högni and Masayoshi Fujita, Lorenz Dangel, Johannes Lehniger, LandR, Weltrecorder, This Quiet Army & Hellenica as Houses Of Worship, and Midori Hirano on Thrill Jockey.

The brothers have also performed as reliable instrumentalists in venues and studios all over the world, all across their home turf of East Berlin at Konzerthaus, Funkhaus, Radialsystem and Vox-Ton Studio, from the Berlin Philharmonie and the Hansa Studios to the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Munich’s Gasteig and Prinzregententheater, as well as famous international cultural centres such as the Barbican and South Bank right through to Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

With their album “Wænde”, they toured throughout Europe, including to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Russia, as well as numerous stops in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and Sweden, and across the United Kingdom in Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester, Woodbridge, Leeds, and London.

The duo plays at German festivals such as Fusion (2018/2022/2023) and Reeperbahn (2019), and finished their 2019 tour with select shows on the West Coast of the United States, including in San Diego, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

They also played a virtual concert during the pandemic at the WOMEX 2021 in Porto and have been volunteering with UNICEF with musical performances at the Photo of the Year Award since 2022.

In 2017, the brothers won the Rilke Special Award at the international Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival in Vienna for their experimental short film “Rilke Ueberoffen” – a moving minimalist visualisation featuring still lifes from their old Plattenbau, combined with a 1911 recording of Rainer Maria Rilke’s love poem “An Lou Andre-Salome” accompanied by four pieces from the CEEYS catalogue.

After an initial grant in 2020, Brueder Selke received in 2022 a further grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture of the state of Brandenburg.

Perspectives

The duo’s creative process over the years has shaped the way Brueder Selke meets today’s polarised world and attempts, artistically, to make the often inconceivable tangible.

They encounter a return of supposedly resolved conflicts in new guises – higher walls, deeper trenches, the resurgence of the cold and even hot wars in Europe, the turning away from friends, the discrimination against dissenters, veiled and openly brutal forms of tyranny – old historical conflicts repeating on a higher level. Through their instrumental music they search for, find and foster a universal exchange of ideas with like-minded people.

Brueder Selke: “The themes of our releases are not contrived. They draw from the past and the present, but above all from encounter and exchange with friends and colleagues – with our listeners around the world… They are the result of lived experiences of a childhood in an East Berlin Plattenbau, behind the Berlin Wall. The past remains a bridge to the world today, to understand the present and to shape the future together… This organic intuitive instinct for authenticity and true closeness reveals more than just a dialogue between us two and our instruments, between the artist and the audience. This natural awareness can be seen as a recognition and continuation of the musical experimentation that began in the former GDR, a sixth sense that widens our worldview in order to incorporate nonconformist perspectives into future plans.”

[Daniel Cole & William Chang]