Brandt Brauer Frick

Brandt Brauer Frick may sound like a badass law firm, but they are, in fact, a badass trio of Germans hell-bent on morphing the lush timbres of classical instrumentation into raunchy beats and bass lines, eschewing the shortcuts of synthesizers and laptops in the process. Miami is their third album together, and one for which Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer and Paul Frick pulled out all the stops. The pedigree of collaborators here are top notch, featuring contributions from Warp soul man Jamie Lidell, Jay Z producer Om'mas Keith, Monika Enterprise boss Gudrun Gut and Russian producer Nina Kraviz. Contrasting 2011's Mr. Machine (an album that employed a ten-piece ensemble to bring their hybrid classical-techno vision to life), Miami hedges its bets in a more brooding, song-based direction. It sounds more rigorously composed, but still with the swing that comes from live performers on un-quantized instruments, filtering the rhythms through their singular perspectives. As such, the BBF sound remains one of the most distinctive and interesting in all of what could be classified as electronic music, bridging the gap between classical and electronic more thoroughly (and relevantly) than a Wendy Carlos box-set.