Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano are pillars of Berlin’s new music community, globally lauded composers who each share a background in classical tradition while practicing at the cutting edge of modern music. Following a series of live collaborations, the group now announce their debut collaborative album Split Scale, due out January 24th, 2025. Starting with the simplistic premise of exploring the western scale from beginning to end, Split Scale sees the group craft a suite of sublime, synaesthetic soundscapes and cinematic movements.
Alongside the album announcement, the group share sublime, minimalist new single “Scale F”. Opening with long brush strokes of ethereal strings embellished with warm electronic thrum, single piano notes glimmer in the darkness like far-off constellations, building slowly into a celestial melody as the group skilfully shape abstract washes of color and texture into a distinctive form.
Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano’s debut album unites two artists who share both inimitable skill and depth of expression. The brothers Sebastian and Daniel Selke are open-minded, critically-acclaimed instrumentalists and composers with a sprawling catalog of international productions. As Brueder Selke, aka CEEYS, the polyinstrumental duo focuses their passion for genre-bending music primarily on their hand-picked Q3Ambientfest, sharing the stage every year with fellow artists such as Laura Cannell, Mabe Fratti, Resina, Jules Reidy, Grand River, Yair Elazar Glotman, and now-collaborator Midori Hirano. Midori Hirano’s mastery of sound sculpting has put her in high demand as a composer for film and television, including recent soundtracks for All or Nothing, Tokito, and a documentary on the Premier League, alongside astounding collaborations with artists including Hprizm of Anti Pop Consortium and Ilpo Väisänen of Pan Sonic. In addition to her own composing, Hirano has remixed the likes of Robot Koch and Rival Consoles.
Split Scale touches on many western musicians’ foundational experiences with sound, the equal tempered scale. “We, in a way, traveled back in time back to our beginnings… our choice of tones was relatively simple, intuitive, almost child’s play,” notes Brueder Selke. “We wanted to take this unique opportunity with Midori to start from zero, and to do it together.” Split Scale is an album born of a collective experience and mastery of instrumentation and arranging that manages to convey a dazzling sense of wonder, as if one was playing an instrument for the first time and truly listening.
