“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

The award-winning East Berlin-born, Potsdam-based, polyinstrumental composer duo Brueder Selke (CEEYS), with Sebastian Selke on cello and his brother Daniel Selke on piano, is continuously performing and expanding their repertoire and, as independent curator, regularly presents 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 this vein, 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 thus find their balance.

Beginnings

Classically trained and with a growing interest in contemporary ideas, Sebastian and Daniel Selke initially started out under the alias CEEYS, creating an ongoing 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:

“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 prefabricated housing area 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 informed 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 profoundly experimental yet accessible tonality of manipulated and processed acoustic and electronic music between avant-garde and pop which intelligently incorporates spontaneous and prepared organic and synthetic elements of impressionistic classical chamber music & free jazz, ambient pads & cinematic sound effects, and dignified chill-out songs & complex abstract noise.

The brothers’ music reflects the myriad sounds they have encountered in their lives. Early influences such as Bach, Beethoven and Debussy are just as recognizable as the almost forgotten East German musicians – in particular Toni Krahl’s rock group City with Georgi Gogow on violin, Frank Fehse’s synthesizer duo Key, and Reinhard Lakomy’s “Der Traumzauberbaum” (songs for children) and “Das Geheime Leben – Electronics” (The Secret Life). While the names City and Key can be seen as components of the neologism CEEYS, inspiration also came from Arvo Pärt, Arthur Russell, and Philip Glass, as well as Hildur Gudnadóttir and Nils Frahm, and Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, they also discovered a generation of East Germans who had similarly embarked on the adventure of exploring the intersection between music, art and science. Whether it’s the subtle works of musician, composer and video artist Frank Bretschneider, who – born in Karl-Marx-Stadt – founded the influential underground band AG Geige in 1986 and released solo albums under the pseudonym Komet, or Carsten Nicolai, whose artistic output as Alva Noto resonates in his music, the fluid transition between complexly interwoven rhythmic structures and strict reductionism, and the analytical view of individual elements, fascinate Brueder Selke to this day.

Dilogies

After a series of reworks in which Sebastian and Daniel reinterpreted the music of Peter Broderick, Ólafur Arnalds, and Lambert as pure cello-piano pieces, the duo released their impressive debut on 1631 Recordings as CEEYS (27|05|16, DL), entitled “The Grunewald Church Session”. In its seamless form, the album serves as a series of loosely blurred memories of their early childhood.

They then returned concretely to their musical roots “in the real socialism” of 1980s East Germany with their follow-up physical album “Concrete Fields” (24|02|17, CD|DL|LP), also on 1631, recorded at Vox-Ton Studio in Berlin by Francesco Donadello and Antonio Pulli.

“Wænde” (11|05|18, CD|DL|LP), their third album and debut on Neue Meister is dedicated to their personal feelings surrounding the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – the “Wende”. In addition to the historical aspects, the Selke brothers also tell anecdotes about the creation process of their first collaborative pieces, which were written in a “Plattenbau” (prefabricated housing block). The walls of their rooms, which were deliberately not soundproofed to save costs and allow for eavesdropping, 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”, featured photographs of “brutalist prefabricated concrete slab constructions”, took place in May 2018 in the historically fitting setting of the legendary Saal 4 of the former GDR Funkhaus Berlin.

Their fourth album and second on Neue Meister is dedicated to their humble childhood El Dorado “Hiddensee” (14|06|19, CD|DL|LP), a small island in the Baltic Sea that was very popular with East Germans in GDR times. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, their newfound freedom to explore the world took the Selke brothers far beyond the borders of their homeland before bringing them back in the final years of the 1990s, 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 times as best they could and overcoming them creatively. As with “Wænde”, motifs of new beginnings are 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. There, the album was re-recorded onto tape in Saal 3, Nils Frahm’s impressive Leiter Studio, an inspirational environment that, with all its unique echo chambers and analogue treasures, is almost a museum. And so the significance of the Funkhaus for their work grew even deeper, as Blocks A and B of the building were where their father once worked as an editor and radio host.

The four aforementioned incognito albums are built around the past, but they serve not only to create an intimate narrative of the brothers’ first steps, centred on German division and later reunification. They also portray a constant melodic search for balance and harmony in their long-term collaboration as a duo, a dialogue that was not yet finished. And so the double LP “Hausmusik” (09|10|20, CD|DL|LP), again on Neue Meister, expanded the anthology once more. Here, the brothers take their distinctive setup to a new level, eschewing the use of synthesizers and effects altogether and shaping the sound only through the capabilities of their main instruments: cello and piano. “Hausmusik” represents a retreat into a purely acoustic world and denotes a calm and humble dynamic mood. As the brothers explain:

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

The carefully curated artist collaborations on the following rework album “Musikhaus” (29|10|21, DL|LP) on Neue Meister – the name itself a mirroring – act as a clever response to the intimate original “Hausmusik” release with wide-ranging reworks by 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. It also provides, in its communality, a calm counterpoint to the pandemic restrictions of the early 2020s.

After these six albums and the MC release via boutique label Oscarson of their original 2016 debut “The Grunewald Church Session” in early 2022, all as CEEYS, there came an answering second part of a hybrid album dilogy which, in its instrumentation and production style, can be seen as a turning point in the work of their collaboration as a duo. Here, the two longstanding musical partners present for the first time an album of a different sort: as a piano duo with virtual string quartet, and under their real names Brueder Selke: “Marienborn” (11|11|22, 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 which he still plays today. 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 innovatively edited and combined for the album. Coupled with a keen sense of asymmetrical time signatures and tempos familiar from electronic music, a number of dual effects such as ping-pong delay, a stereo spring reverb, and finally a sequenced analogue filter were used before finally travelling through a quartet of legendary, painstakingly restored RFZ preamps.

Thus the entire work process follows, on the one hand, the aesthetics of analogue recordings, and on the other, in the postproduction, the In-The-Box techniques of digital production. The free layering of different phrases allows the two pianos to 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 that only gently graze the strings, and last but not least, soft framing drones from the string quartet sets the album in a potentiality between intimacy and expansiveness.

“Go East” followed on Aimée Portioli’s (aka Grand River on Spazio Disponibile/Mego/Ghostly) astute One Instrument label (23|11|23, DL|MC), featuring meditative improvised drones on restored socialist-era keyboard instruments such as a stringmachine, two organs and the simply-named E-Piano combined with an absorbing full album visualisation by the remarkable Marco Ciceri based on a number of significant GDR mosaics in Potsdam.

Ultimately, their entire back catalogue can be divided into dilogies. After three under their alias CEEYS: “The Grunewald Church Session” & “Concrete Fields” (from sketchy childhood fragments to the 1980s), “Wænde” & “Hiddensee” (the historic Wende of 1989 and the vague 1990s), “Hausmusik” & “Musikhaus” (an acoustic duo and a multi-layered rework album from the present), and an initial bridging dilogy between CEEYS & Brueder Selke: “The Grunewald Church Session” & “Marienborn” (the physical release on MC of their debut and the former GDR border checkpoint as turning point in the brothers’ work), a second “true” Brueder Selke release “Go East” completed the first dilogy as Brueder Selke: “Marienborn” & “Go East” (the historic memorial and restored instruments from the socialist era).

Finally, “Belka & Strelka”, based around the legendary flight of the two Russian space dogs, followed on trusty boutique label Oscarson (24|11|23, CD|DL|LP) as album and concert film, and is intended as part one of a new dilogic cycle.

Collaborative Paths

“Kollektivarbeit,” (collective work) the East Berliners explain with a smile, “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” 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 CEEYS is titled “Nothing Special” and has a track length of 11 minutes. The 10-inch vinyl with elaborate artwork was released in early 2020. Before the pandemic hit, the collaboration was originally slated to premiere with a meditative performance at Q3Ambientfest 2020, an annual musical happening the brothers have been organizing in the UNESCO City of Film Potsdam since 2017.

Happenings

Ultimately it is encounters and exchanges with like-minded friends and emerging and renowned fellow artists like Laura Cannell, Andrea Belfi, Grand River, Peter Broderick, Hélène Vogelsinger, Yair Elazar Glotman, James Heather, Midori Hirano, Echo Collective, Poppy Ackroyd, Julia Reidy, Masayoshi Fujita, Carlos Cipa, Aidan Baker, Hania Rani, Mabe Fratti, and Ale Hop, to name just a few, that inspire them to curate their own cosy musical happenings, such as their now legendary Q3Ambientfest with its 8th edition coming in 2024.

Held annually in the UNESCO City of Film Potsdam, Q3Ambientfest is organized in cooperation with the Waschhaus Potsdam and 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.

On the occasion of the 1000th anniversary of Cologne’s Basilica of the Holy Apostles, Q3A collaborated for the first time with the Domstadt Ambient Festival by digitally projecting a live Hauschka concert from Cologne onto a screen in the Zionskirche in Berlin and presenting it together with performances by Alvin Lucier’s “The Ever Present Orchestra” and Brueder Selke themselves. The church is still known today, among other things, for its “Umwelt-Bibliothek” (Environmental Library), a former dissident movement that courageously exposed the mechanisms by which the totalitarian regime of the GDR functioned, and to this day shows how resistance to totalitarianism can and must be built up and, despite any painful setbacks, ultimately leads to success.

The Selke brothers invite emerging and renowned fellow artists and like-minded friends to Q3A not only to meet them on a common physical stage but also to create a strong bond between multi-faceted, cinematic music, from avant-garde to pop, and the eclectic architecture of the world-famous UNESCO City of Film Potsdam, which spans styles from neoclassical palaces to brutalist “Plattenbau”. Socialist-era buildings gave Q3A its name – Q3A is short for Querwandbau, a three to five story prefabricated building constructed in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Coincidentally, the first edition took place in the very year that marked the centennial of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. While the fourth and fifth editions took place virtually, due to the pandemic, with artists streaming cosy sets from their homes, since 2022 the curators now present hybrid versions. Preparations for Q3A 2024 have already begun. 

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 is sponsored by the Brandenburg state capital Potsdam. 

Finally a rework by Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek) based on the track “Rueber” by CEEYS is used for their aftermovies.

Further locally based curatorial work includes series like the co-curated Kosmoskonzerte (2017–2023), house concerts at the Rechenzentrum, the Flimmerkonzerte (2018–2021), film concerts at the Filmmuseum, the Novemberstimmung (since 2019), an occasional mini-festival in random venues, and the Haus2konzerte (since 2021) at freiLand.

To date, the Selke brothers have hosted around 220 artists from 28 countries.

Solo

In addition to their releases as a duo, numerous collaborations, the curation of widely varying concert formats, and other genre-bending interdisciplinary projects, Sebastian and Daniel also dedicate themselves to their respective solo work. Starting with the everyday shortages in the former GDR and consequently driven by their deep-rooted need to improvise, the two soloists experiment not only with cello and piano, but also with other sometimes antiquarian instruments from the socialist era. Their setup today began with a cello that originated in Klingenthal, one of the famous towns in Saxony’s so-called “Musikwinkel” (Music Corner) of the historic Vogtland district.

On their 2019 EP “Q3A”, they combined for the first time in an impressive and original way their long-standing musical connection 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. If you layer the two tracks on top of each other, a hidden third emerges. The physical 7-inch EP was released on Oscarson by master paper engineer and designer Matthias Rehling, a label that Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), David Allred (w/ Peter Broderick), and Brigid Mae Power also occasionally call home. Both Sebastian and Daniel saw “Q3A” as a welcome opportunity to explore the components of their shared sonic signature.

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 kick drums, made at Elektroakustische Manufaktur in Erlbach, another place from the “Musikwinkel”. A digital delay (DD-20) in ping-pong mode and a sequenced analogue filter by Bob Moog, the synthesizer legend from the East Coast of the USA, suggestively continue the brothers’ approach:

“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 says of the piece.

He himself plays his restored childhood piano on the B-side of the record along with a heavily modifying organismic vocal synthesizer on a track titled “For Sebastian”. This synthesizer was developed by a Ukrainian radio engineer and musician who later emigrated to Russia. Following their penchant for unusual combinations, these relics are processed and mixed with present-day echo, tremolo and filter effects – allowing past and present to collide once again.

The brothers also use barely audible field recordings and sounds made on portable tape recorders their father once used for his journalistic work.  

“Q3A” was the first part of a planned trilogy, and after working on the solo aspects of the duo, part two “Brueder Selke – QP” was released in 2021. While the hidden layering effect of part one was similarly adopted for part two, this was the first time that virtual, sample-based sounds, mostly from their own recordings, have been used, and so sheds some light on their work with digital production techniques. The third part QX is planned as a Q3Ambientfest compilation.

Klingenthal Studio

In their own Klingenthal Studio, with the support of Simon Goff (Joker/Chernobyl), they have installed four intact RFZ preamplifiers and a well-preserved Studer 962 refurbished by Matthias H. Franz Hahn (Nils Frahm/Ólafur Arnalds), a portable, wood-framed analogue console from the, in the 1980s, unreachable West. In addition, there is a collection of restored microphones, spring reverb systems, keyboard instruments, and rhythm boxes – audio technology that was originally manufactured between the 1950s and 1980s, came from former Eastern Bloc manufacturers, or with some other personal connection to the brothers’ overall concept.

Even their listening environment is bespoke and based on RFT, a manufacturer's association of various telecommunications companies in the GDR:

“After using only a pair of RL940s by Geithain for the longest time, we began more and more to prefer BR25 speakers. The BR25 is a 2-way Hi-Fi bass reflex speaker which introduced a completely new generation of loudspeaker boxes in the GDR. VEB Musikelektronik Geithain was the first to develop a speaker that was completely based on experience and technology from the studio sector. Privately 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,” they explain.

It is connected to either finely tuned B9151 “Merkur” or brute Vermona “Regent” speakers. Their furniture was designed by a cardboard manufacturer based in East Berlin: “One of the shelves where we store our records is made of flexible and recyclable cardboard.” The two add with a grin, “In the GDR, people even used this material to build bodies for cars like the once-coveted, now infamous ‘Trabant’ – the car was also known as ‘racing cardboard’!” 

Brueder Selke

Since 2020, Sebastian and Daniel have also been releasing music under the name Brueder Selke, their real name. It was also used for their rework of “Fishermen” by Alev Lenz on Spitfire Audio, which received an honourable mention from the composer. On the project “Zero Crossing” with the New York artist Eric Maltz they produced an MC in two soundscapes and released it through Eric’s record label Flower Myth.

In 2021 they presented “QP”, the second part of their solo Plattenbau trilogy on Oscarson, also under their new name. Several tracks from their 2022 double piano album “Marienborn” had already found their way pre-release onto some prestigious playlists. In the process of producing the album, the Selke brothers discovered in 2020 yet another entirely separate field of work 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 was an ideal conceptual fit for the two, as it stands for “Left and Right”, the two stereo channels. For a product line, they were able to put together in short time a unique library based on their collection of restored “Soviet Era Synthesizers”. This was followed by “Prepared Piano”, a sample pack of two GDR pianos from Daniel’s childhood. Now Sebastian’s Klingenthal-built cello, rare East German toy instruments, and custom-made instruments will also be added.

Their two most recent albums “Go East” and “Belka & Strelka” from November 2023 summarize and demonstrate the full range of their long-term collaboration, from their interest in historical events to stories from everyday life, from studio work to a live performance on a physical stage. 

They have also begun work on “Hausmusik – Notenband 1” and “Notenband 2”. These art and music books are named for the CEEYS album of the same name and are based on acoustic versions of the duo’s repertoire and will be released with publisher Ries & Erler.

The sheet music will be complemented by the remaining photos from their “Betonfelder” series from 2015, some of which have already been used as artwork on their record covers and liner notes. In the series, their childhood home, a brutalist “Plattenbau” common in GDR times, is examined and photographed from various different perspectives. A winding labyrinth, confusing, anonymous, with countless rows of balconies, huge mosaics – and here and there a cat on the windowsill. The pictures were taken with an original Zeiss Ikon and a Reflekta II camera under professional guidance and form the visual component of almost all their releases. For example, the cover of “Hiddensee”, a kind of travel album, shows the same apartment block from an ambiguous angle and resembles 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 and for the first time will take place in collaboration with the OKEV at Kunstwerk gallery in Potsdam in Summer 2024.

In other respects too the two artists have always been interested in the visual realization of their musical narratives, and so the special edition of “Hiddensee”, limited to 100 copies, comes with 12 printed postcards, corresponding to the number of tracks on the album. These cards were produced with a risograph printer and show scenes 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 intermeshing approach of the Selke brothers follows a meaningful idea to which both remain deeply committed: the search for harmony between the musical profession and human existence through a constant balancing of the elements in their interdisciplinary works.

After the two years of constant uncertainty during the pandemic, Sebastian & Daniel decided to continue their dual approach in parallel, on the one hand under their alias CEEYS, and on the other hand under their more personal signum: Brueder Selke.

Echo 

Encouraged even from a pre-school age to play music by their parents, actress Gabriele Selke and radio journalist Harald Selke, the brothers both studied music, Sebastian at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin and Daniel at the Hochschule für Musik “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig. Today Sebastian works as acting principal cellist with the Deutsches Filmorchester 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 been the musical directors of the Schaffrath Kammerorchester, now their own renamed Hausorchester.

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

Their releases can be found on 1631 Recordings, Neue Meister, Oscarson, One Instrument, 7K!, Lady Blunt Records, Bigo & Twigetti, Flower Myth, Piano & Coffee Records, Blwbck Records, Leiter Verlag, Gregory Euclide’s “Thesis Project”, Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Urbina’s Emmy-winning journalism project “The Outlaw Ocean”, and Canadian audio content provider LandR.

Their compositions have also often featured in local and international film documentaries and on television, such as on the German crime series “Tatort”, on theatre stages (most recently 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. Brueder Selke can be found on high-profile playlists, radio shows and streaming platforms worldwide.

Their entire back catalogue is available digitally worldwide, and physically either on CD, LP or, with “Zero Crossing”, “The Grunewald Church Session” and “Go East”, also on MC. While “The Grunewald Church Session” & “Concrete Fields” are distributed digitally worldwide through Decca Publishing, “Wænde” & “Hiddensee”, “Hausmusik” & “Musikhaus”, “Marienborn” & “Go East” and “Belka & Strelka” are published by Kick The Flame in Leipzig.

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, with Midori Hirano, and the Filmorchester Babelsberg.

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 in 2018 throughout Europe, 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 have also played famous festivals such as Fusion (2018/22/23) and Reeperbahn (2019), and finished their tour in 2019 with select shows on the West Coast of the United States, performing in San Diego, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. During the pandemic they also played a virtual concert at the WOMEX 2021 in Porto.

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 visualization featuring still lifes from their childhood prefab apartment building, significantly inspired by a 1911 recording of Rainer Maria Rilke’s love poem “An Lou Andre-Salome”, combined with a score of 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 to expand their Klingenthal Studio.

Perspectives

The duo’s creative process over the years has shaped the way Brueder Selke meets today’s polarized world, which is why their creative urge is also informed by current issues.

They encounter a return of supposedly resolved conflicts in new guises – higher walls, deeper trenches, the resurgence of the Cold War, the turning away from friends, the discrimination against dissenters, veiled and openly brutal forms of tyranny – old historical conflicts repeating on a higher level. In the end it is through their instrumental music that the two enter into a universal exchange of ideas with like-minded people.

“The themes of our releases are not contrived. They draw from the past and the present, but above all from encounters and exchanges with friends and colleagues – with our listeners around the globe. They are the result of lived experiences of a childhood in an East Berlin Plattenbau, behind the Berlin Wall,” they emphasize.

“This organic intuitive instinct for authenticity and veritable 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 experiments that began in the former GDR, a sixth sense that widens the view of Brueder Selke to pull in nonconformist perspectives into future plans.”

Sebastian & Daniel Selke, Brueder Selke (CEEYS)

[Daniel Cole & William Chang]

02/2024