Inside Brüder Selke & Midori Hirano's Musical Laboratory

Berlin-based composers Brüder Selke and Midori Hirano have created Split Scale, a deeply contemplative work built upon the foundational elements of Western music. The brothers Sebastian and Daniel Selke, raised in East Berlin during the twilight of the GDR, bring their masterful chamber music sensibilities to meet Hirano's nuanced electronic textures, marking their first full-length collaboration following several acclaimed live performances. Their shared background in classical piano forms a natural meeting place between their distinct musical languages, allowing them to present an album that transforms basic musical building blocks into rich, emotionally resonant soundscapes.

The heart of Split Scale lies in its deceptively simple premise: each composition springs from a single note of the Western scale, moving from A through G and back to A. Working in separate studios, the artists divided these tonal foundations between them, with Hirano initiating half the pieces and the Selke brothers the other half. Through an extended process of trading and refining tracks, they developed an intimate musical dialogue that transcends the physical distance of their creative spaces, weaving together acoustic instrumentation, synthesized sounds, and meticulous electronic processing.

The album's progression mirrors the cyclical nature of musical scales, with each piece building upon the last to create what Hirano describes as "climbing up a long, colorful staircase." Their methodology reflects a deeper artistic philosophy about returning to musical fundamentals while pushing forward into new territories of expression. The Selke brothers, who run the genre-defying Q3Ambientfest in Potsdam, and Hirano, known for her film scoring and experimental electronic work as MimiCof, have found common ground in this exploration of foundational musical elements.

Lawrence Peryer: The album uses each note of a Western scale as a foundation for each piece. How did this deceptively simple concept evolve into your compositional process?

Sebastian Selke: My daughter Alma, who will be starting school in 2025, loves experimentation, which has reminded me of the origins of my musical work. Just as she listens to the sounds of all the acoustic and electronic instruments we have collected over the years and keeps trying different techniques on them, that's how I first experimented with making my own sounds on the recorder when I was little, before I discovered the cello. The starting point is the same, so we wanted to follow this original spirit of discovery here in our first collaboration.

Daniel Selke: That's right. I often see that with my pupils. When things aren't working technically, or the keys just aren't pressing as they should, I try to get them to forget the intellectual methodology and take a more playful approach to the seemingly difficult passages and, in this way, break them down to their essence. Most of the time, it works well, and it's also fun putting the individual puzzle pieces together. In our complex world, it's important to change our perspective now and then.

Midori Hirano: We still let ourselves have creative freedom within this simple concept while leaving some space for one another to respect each other. It was like building a house and putting the furniture together, picking the colors, and making the rooms and spaces in between.

And I suppose our ways of creating sound are slightly different: when it comes to how we produced this album, while Sebastian and Daniel played mainly with acoustic instruments and hardware equipment, I worked a lot on the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), aside from playing the piano. So, I think our different approaches were one of the factors that made it sound so rich. And it's not just about the mix of analog and digital sounds; it's also about how we work with the gaps between the sounds and how we build the harmonies with different textures of sounds.

Lawrence: Sebastian and Daniel, how does your experience growing up behind the Berlin Wall inform your approach to musical collaboration today?

Sebastian: At the time of the Wende, the fall of communism in the former GDR, we were not yet ten years old. The socialist-aligned school had given us a particular image of the "decadent Western hemisphere.” So we spent our days with our frequent and exhausting flag ceremonies as if on an isolated island. However, we were lucky to attend an exclusive music school in East Berlin. Through our studies, we were able to gradually build up a cello-piano chamber music duo. Thanks to our parents' "exotic" record collection, we always knew there was a lot more out there somewhere. Our curiosity grew, and the creative album covers especially transported at least our minds to faraway places. Then, when we heard the music and wanted to know more about this or that record, our rising euphoria was always accompanied by an immanent melancholy.

Daniel: Yes, and we only realized what had been missing when, despite the massive social upheaval, the Berlin Wall fell faster than even the boldest visionaries had anticipated. That was, at the time, culturally shocking but not paralyzing. We accepted the realities of the new world. We soon had a Walkman, which we used to listen to the entire musical spectrum on cassette. Unimagined contacts came to life. Since then, encounters and exchanges with like-minded people have become the most important fundamental building blocks for us. One of the expressions of this is our Q3Ambientfest, which is always lovingly conceived and realized despite all difficulties and is now known far beyond Potsdam.

Lawrence: You split the album's pieces between you—Midori starting half, the Selkes initiating the other half. What surprised you about how your sections began speaking to each other?

Midori: Each time we played together on stage, it was a one-off, a short improvisation. Taking our time and listening to each other's recordings over and over again allowed us to see layers of similarities and differences that we hadn't noticed before. It was a pleasant discovery rather than a surprise. Also, how well the analog and digital sounds blended was beyond my expectations.

Sebastian: Of course, we're familiar with Midori's releases. Her subtle approach to electronic music captivated us from the beginning. Then, when we heard her solo pieces on the piano, we were so inspired that we wanted to create something together. As we mentioned—we both studied classical music; that's where our roots lie, but we've never closed ourselves off from other forms of musical expression. We've always sought to merge these artistic worlds in challenging and entertaining ways. We thought, through Midori's approach, the three of us could achieve something special.

Daniel: For the pieces, we were to set the initial impetus, and we approached them in a playful and minimalist way using textures and patterns to see whether our counterpart would find an inspiring spark in these simple figures. The pieces that Midori then sent us were, as first drafts, already so sophisticated and atmospheric that it was so much fun just immersing ourselves in these elegant moving surfaces and floating away on them. In this respect, we were perhaps less surprised because we already knew beforehand that with Midori, a shared musical consciousness would carry us through the work process.

Lawrence: The album involved trading tracks back and forth between studios. How did this distance affect the music compared to live collaborations?

Daniel: Playing live, we are very attuned to each other. Although it's always a pleasure as a musician to interact intuitively on stage, we sometimes miss the momentum for lovingly crafting something more elaborate. Maybe it's just a feeling, but at home in our Klingenthal studio in Potsdam, we could always take our time and fully enjoy Midori's sounds and emotive piano playing. It's like an intense observation under a microscope.

Sebastian: By now, we've shared a physical stage many times. And we never tire of finding new opportunities. There's just something so special between us that works without too intensive rehearsals and is nevertheless always at a high musical level, with great sensitivity and understanding for the bilateral and, at the same time, unifying musical language. It's a bit like a string quartet that has been meeting for decades and knows and understands each other perfectly. We even accompanied Midori for a silent movie.

Midori: This working process took over two years with several months' breaks, allowing me to think well about what I could or wanted to add to the recorded sounds I received from Sebastian and Daniel each time. Having played together on stage several times before, each time an improvised set, this album work has certainly given me a deeper understanding of their compositional side and a lot of inspiration.

Of course, certain excitement and special moments can only happen in the sessions on stage or in the studio. So, while our future live performances together will be based on the tracks from this album, they will also incorporate improvisational elements, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Lawrence: Midori, could you discuss how your work scoring films like Tokito shaped your approach to these cinematic soundscapes?

Midori: Scoring music to stories often adds emotion and tension, and although there are many opinions on this, I think it is a good exercise for my creativity. So far, I haven't been particularly aware of this effect, but I think it has broadened my "musical emotional swing." In other words, I may have become more objective about how much I need to control or limit this amplitude of emotion in my work to achieve the result that I find most beautiful and how to create and develop harmony.

Lawrence: Sebastian, you have mentioned playing cello with a synthesizer in the sub-bass range. Could you walk us through how these hybrid instrumental techniques developed during recording?

Sebastian: As discussed earlier, the entire Brueder Selke setup follows a classical approach. The instruments you hear must be playable by hand and in real-time. There are no loops and no MIDI notes from the computer for the sequencer or arpeggiator. It's a bit more time-consuming, but it has the practical advantage for us as artists who often play live that even when there are technical bugs, our pieces can still be played on our acoustic instruments. A kind of backup. I also know colleagues who use a nice Whammy pedal to shift their cello down an octave. I like to try to leave the instruments as they were designed, except for some ambiance and echoes. As it is, the cello already has a wide range with its four strings. So here I have a Vermona Mono Lancet set up as a sub-bass that I play with my foot via a MIDI controller.

Lawrence: The color-coded album artwork mirrors the music's synesthetic qualities. How did the visual and sonic elements influence each other?

Midori: After finishing the album, Sebastian and Daniel suggested this idea for the cover based on Newton’s color wheel. Maybe they already had this image in mind while making it, but I didn’t. So, I was surprised when Daniel Castrejón showed us the cover artwork he made based on this idea. I felt like we made this album for that cover.

Since the album was created with the simple concept of each song being based on a Western musical scale from A to A, matching it with the seven primary colors was perfect. I think this cover image even helped the album become more perfect as an entire piece of work. So, I'm very grateful to the brothers for coming up with this idea.

Sebastian: We're always coming across ideas that inspire us. While we were thinking about the album’s design, I found a connection to the Isaac Newton color wheel in my research. Visually, we wanted to reference Newton and his color wheels, which are based on the musical scale: Newton's rainbow forms the well-known ROYGBIV because he believed the range of visible colors should be analogous to the seven-note scale. One color—one note. Melodies were thus transformed into a linear sequence of corresponding colors. But the rhythm of the melody couldn't be recorded by the colored chips. Electronic reproduction was, therefore, an important development, as the duration of the sound could be represented by the width of the colored stripes. An interesting example of synesthesia. Different sensory perception levels are linked: hearing, seeing, and, of course, feeling.

Daniel: Well, first and foremost, we want to make music. But for us, there are exciting affinities at all levels of human creativity. Including short inspirational diversions such as this one: Besides discovering the spectral decomposition of light, the arrangement of colors in a color wheel is Newton's pivotal contribution to the foundation of physiological optics. His idea was to create a parallel to music so that the colors from violet to purple to red lead back upon themselves in the same way the notes of the scale do in octaves. In Newton's Opticks, each of the seven colors of the color wheel is assigned a note of the seven-note scale. To follow Newton's idea, you would have to use the standard scale of today with twelve equally spaced semitones instead of the Dorian church mode used by Newton. For the color wheel, you also have to introduce the "principle of equidistance." It's easy to lose yourself in such exciting topics. And the beauty of this interdisciplinary world of ideas: Daniel Castrejón (Umor Rex) got to work and sent us a design for the album cover. We were all immediately impressed. Scientific details are exciting. The best thing about the research was that it led to creative, collaborative work on the album.

Lawrence: Given your classical backgrounds, what drew each of you toward experimental electronic music and sound design?

Sebastian: For us, electronic music has always existed alongside classical music. On top of that, in GDR times, there were also numerous interesting and extremely varied radio plays set to music. The fairy tales, with their brilliant narrators, still fascinate me today. Our parents' "exotic" vinyl collection, with albums from Vangelis and Isao Tomita, was also a cultural bridge. When the Berlin Wall fell, the first affordable keyboards began appearing in specialist stores. We got some discarded organs and electric pianos from Vermona, which we later restored. Pickup systems for string instruments were still in their infancy at the time. These have become much simpler and better in recent years.

Daniel: Of course, there have always been tendencies in the past to place elements of classical music into a contemporary context. Aesthetically, we found this rather strange at first. But it was precisely these projects that spurred us and brought us to our ideas. We needed quite some time to filter out and bring together the most important parameters for us, from experimental and more accessible music to ultimately integrate them into our duo.

Midori: I gradually lost interest in classical music during my university studies and wanted other music that would excite me more. It was the early 2000s, and some friends introduced me to electronic music from the late nineties, like 4hero, The Prodigy, Aphex Twin, and Squarepusher. At the same time, I started using a DAW for my job working in a music studio. Then, I became more interested in the connection between the music I listened to and the software and equipment. I tried to analyze the structure of the music I was interested in and to understand as much as possible how it was produced.

I was living in Tokyo at the time, and I also discovered a lot of experimental music at concerts and in record shops. There was a very small venue called Off Site, which no longer exists, but I often went there. The music they played there had to be extremely quiet because the venue was in a residential area. I've seen Toshimaru Nakamura, Sawako, Taku Sugimoto, and many other musicians playing super-experimental electroacoustic music.

It was very inspiring and showed me that there's a lot of freedom in music. Although the music I'm making now, like this record Split Scale, is often made according to certain rules, the way I see the world of sound has widened thanks to the continuous experience with the other side of music.

Lawrence: Midori, you've collaborated with artists ranging from Hprizm to Ilpo Väisänen. How do these diverse musical conversations feed into your current work?

Midori: I sometimes like to work with musicians whose music is fundamentally different from my own but with whom I have some resonance to make new musical discoveries. So, I would say that my collaborations with them didn't come from nowhere but were a natural part of the development of my artistic practice.

For example, my collaboration with Hprizm in 2017 came about after we shared a bill a few years earlier. We produced a track called “Love Control” for the compilation album Sichten 1 on the Raster label, released the following year. I made a sketch with some lo-fi hip-hop-style beats with a bit of the essence of glitch. I just sent it to him and asked him if he could do something on it; then, at some point, he sent back the track with his rap vocals, which he overdubbed and did some effects on to make it sound a little abstract. It was very cool, and it opened a door for me to explore another musical dimension in myself.

My other collaboration with Ilpo was more for live sessions than producing tracks together. It was an idea from Mo Loschelder, who books shows for both of us. She suggested that we do a session together also with Schneider TM as a trio when she organized an open-air concert in the summer of 2021 in Berlin. I enjoyed that distorting, chaotic set in a way, and so Mo arranged another session for us as a duo at her agency's fifteenth-anniversary event three years later. The second session was a bit more structured than the first but still quite eclectic.

These two collaborations were done under my other alias, MimiCof, which I have been doing for twelve years. This is parallel to my project under my own name, and it’s more for electronic music with an experimental approach. But I feel that my two projects have crossed over in recent years, probably because of all the musical exploration I have done. So, I do think that the experience of pushing boundaries helps me to keep expanding my sonic palette. It also gives me a fresh perspective on working with musicians like Brüder Selke, who share more classical musical styles than those mentioned above.

Lawrence: The Selke brothers run Q3Ambientfest, featuring artists like Laura Cannell and Mabe Fratti. How does curating other musicians' work affect your creative process?

Sebastian: The Q3Ambientfest was recently described by a colleague as the opposite of a commercial festival, specifically as "a real community of music enthusiasts." That's exactly what we want to be. No more and no less. That's what it should be about, and that's what it will be. We think it would be great if there were more satellites in our musical field. Then, at some point, it'll be normal to hear Tchaikovsky in the first part of a concert and a piece for synthesizers in the second part. Or vice versa. Fortunately, things are moving a lot, and others are doing similar things, but encounters and exchanges are the real linchpins of our work. In this way, we have already discovered countless exciting projects and set something real against this often seemingly digital-only world. Ideally, this results in a wonderful collaboration developed over years of joint concerts, such as this special one with Midori, which finally culminates in an album we can give back to the music lovers.

Daniel: We never tire of following this ideal. This whole movement has been making inroads for a while now into the field of classically associated instruments: violin, viola, oboe, clarinet, tuba, horn, and trumpet, and if you look beyond the Western canon, the list is even longer. Then there are the wonderful sheet music books being published, which will provide further entry points. We plan to publish our first sheet music volume in a few months. So, we continue to pursue all these ideas. Despite the numerous cost-cutting plans, we keep building upon the strong support of our city of Potsdam and invite all our fellow artists to a cozy and enriching musical party in Potsdam.

Visit Brüder Selke at bruederselke.com and Midori Hirano at midorihirano. Purchase Brüder Selke & Midori Hirano's Split Scale from Bandcamp and listen on your streaming platform of choice.