Frank Bretschneider is a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Bretschneider’s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
Bretschneider was raised in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz since 1990), where his aesthetic developed as he listened to pirate radio and smuggled Beastie Boys tapes in the former East Germany. After studying fine arts and inspired by science fiction radio plays and films he began experimenting with tape machines, synthesizers, and modified guitars in 1984, as well as exploring the possibilities of exchange between visual art and music by various means such as film, video and computer graphics.
In 1986 Bretschneider founded AG Geige, a successful and influential East German underground band. After three albums and splitting in 1993, Bretschneider and fellow AG Geige member Olaf Bender founded the Rastermusic record label in 1995, which eventually merged with Carsten Nicolai’s noton to form raster-noton (now raster media) in 1999. Since then Bretschneider has released more than 30 albums on various labels including 12k, Line, Mille Plateaux, and Faitiche, exploring the possibilities and boundaries of electronic music, from beat driven, almost club suitable music, to the more adventurous and abstract side of the genre.
Bretschneider will be performing at this year’s A L’ARME! FESTIVAL at Radialsystem.
FACTS
1. white
2. blue
3. black
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Imagination, curiosity, memories…
2. How and when did you get into making music?
Clearly inspired by the British industrial music scene and the German ‘Geniale Dilettanten’ movement, I started in 1983 with a second-hand guitar and three tape machines to release my first cassette in Karl-Marx-Stadt, GDR, in 1985.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Miles Davis – Big Fun
Kraftwerk – same
Laurie Anderson – United States Live
Vladislav Delay – Entain
Goat – New Games
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Anonymity, Independence…
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
My place
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Painting
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Radian – Juxtaposition
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’ve been working with Jan Jelinek since 2016 (as BEISPIEL), which is perfect
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a performer just recently in June at Zwingli-Kirche with Jan
As a spectator some, maybe Pan Sonic at Star Club, Dresden in 1998
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Without technology I wouldn’t make music, probably.
11. What can we expect from your performance at this year’s A L’ARME! FESTIVAL festival?
It will be a live improvisation on a modular system, similar to my new album POUNDING (r-m214)
