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You Make Me Real is quite possibly the most fascinating dance-oriented music album of the past decade. An inverted Kraftwerk, the classically trained trio of Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer and Paul Frick compose music that is at once avant-garde classical and thumping club music.
Like Dub Narcotic Sound System, BBF are a performing band – Brandt plays the dance beats on an acoustic drum set, propelling the interweaving keyboard lines of Brauer and Frick. The result is along the lines of Maximilian Skiba‘s cabaret jazz-influenced “Safari Jazz,” i.e., mellow and soothing, but infectiously danceable, especially on the first true track of the album, “Bop.” “Paparazzi” is a noir-ish composition that could almost pass for the opening theme to a police drama. “Mi Corazon” mixes old school jungle with Latin influences. The title track uses dubstep-based ideas to create and eerie, spacey, trance-inducing soundscape. It all comes together with the finale, “Teufelsleiter,” a truly avant-garde composition that would fit perfectly in a set with Steve Reich and Terry Riley.
It takes real talent to combine avant-garde classical music with dance club music and not make it sound like some pretentious hipster carnival of excess. Perhaps it takes a German touch to do it right. Or maybe it was just the right time. Regardless, this is an album sure to inspire and entirely new genre of dance music. Now what do we call it…?
