Episode 224: Cosmik Repercussions 93.3 CFMU, McMaster University, June 18, 2025

Cosmik Repercussions 93.3 CFMU McMaster University

Thank you for listening to Cosmik Repercussions for June 18, 2025

Featuring New Music: Peter Chilvers, Grandbrothers, Raz Ohara, Tobias Bergson, Dmitry Evgrafov, Velvet Moon, Visors, Ishi.

Other Artists featured: BT, Linus Loves, Goldfrapp, Woody Woods.
Welcome new listeners from Pakistan.
For a full track listing please visit: https://cfmu.ca/episode/cosmik-repercussions-episode-for-2025-06-18/
Artist Profile of the Week: Grandbrothers

For much of their career, Grandbrothers transformed a limitation into inspiration. Across four acclaimed albums, the duo of German Turkish pianist Erol Sarp and Swiss engineer/software designer Lukas Vogel created captivating music in which each sound originated from one instrument: the grand piano. Telepathically attuned to each other’s talents, the two extracted sounds out of a grand piano that nobody had extracted before.
Sarp and Vogel first met in university, at an entrance exam for piano. Sarp was studying as a pianist while Vogel was immersed in electronic music production—crafting electronic devices, building his own synthesizers – but the pair bonded over a shared interest in minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and John Cage.
In 2011, when they began creating music together, they settled on a deceptively brilliant conceit. Manipulating the instrument with a range of acoustic pick-ups and electromechanical devices devised by Vogel, including hammers that hit the piano strings to alter their sound, Grandbrothers crafted music that was both classical and modern.
Their discography – comprising ‘Dilation’ (2015), ‘Open’ (2017), ‘All The Unknown’ (2021) and ‘Late Reflections’ (2023) – honoured this central idea and blurred the lines between ambient, minimalism, and acoustic techno, drawing equally from Sarp’s pedigree as a trained jazz pianist and Vogel’s skill as an engineer. But after ‘Late Reflections’ which they recorded in the historic Cologne Cathedral, Sarp and Vogel began to feel that they had taken the concept as far as it could go. What once felt liberating about their approach now felt constraining.
But ‘We Collide,’ one of the first tracks Sarp and Vogel composed for the album, pointed a way forward. Based on a funk-inspired breakbeat that morphs and evolves, fluctuating between fragile and heavy passages, the song served as a bridge of sorts; piano remains central to its undulating melodies, but other elements thrive in the mix, too. The duo tested it out at gigs in 2024 and felt validated by the audience response, with fans dancing and vibing to the rhythms. They felt encouraged to continue in this direction.
Courtesy of Ian Sparkes 9 PR

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