Brace/Choir @ Acud Club Berlin | Friday, 18.04.2014

Brace/Choir is a trancerock quartet founded in Berlin, Germany in 2006. Musically, the band channels a dark, minimalist psychedelia to resurrect such classic themes as death, birth, rebirth, heartbreak, multiple personality disorder, and identity theft.

Brace/Choir communicates in an ur-language of rock and roll, taking turns singing the alternately mantra-like and narrative texts. Band members often switch instruments with each song (both live and in the studio), allowing each instrument to speak with a different voice. Their shadowy and ecstatic rhythm and blues is continuously recast over shifting organ drones and is reminiscent of such diverse bands as Bongwater, The Replacements, and Faust.

Brace/Choir | Five Fingered Leaf

Childhood friends and Massachusetts natives Samuels and Gassmann met Californian Youssef and Berliner Adrian in Berlin in 2005 and formed the Joy Division-inspired speed-surf band Dus Vor Kount. While Samuels came to Berlin to pursue a degree in philosophy and work as a journalist in 2000, Gassmann was working as a street musician and bicycle mechanic.

When Youssef and Adrian went on hiatus from the band (writing a PhD and training as a speech therapist, respectively) Gassmann and Samuels continued on as a duo and, out necessity, learned to play other instruments. When the four were reunited in 2008, Brace/Choir was born, now committed to switching instruments, making slower, more repetitive music, and writing each other’s lyrics.

Brace/Choir | Rebel Roar Cheyenne

With “Turning On Your Double”, their follow-up to 2010’s self-titled EP, Brace/Choir have made an LP of idiosyncratic Trancerock geared towards the listener of whole albums. At its core, Turning on Your Double is a series of dark and ecstatic tales of mental illness, written and recorded in Berlin, Germany amidst tectonic shifts both personal and political.

The eight songs are a meditation on social and individual struggles with compulsive disorders, power and inverted schizophrenia: four people united by an idealistic vision of collaboration who come to think they’re one – and the cracks that show in their lives and personalities when the music stops.