German vocalist, keyboardist and guitarist Frank Bretschneider was a member of the new-wave band AG Geige with two other keyboardists and another guitarist. They released Yachtclub + Buchteln (1986), Trickbeat (1989) and Raabe? (1991).
Bretschneider had already recorded Glueckliche Jahre (1985) in a duo called Kriminelle Tanzkapelle, and
Vater Alfons erzählt
(1986) in another duo,
Stein im Brett.
Alle Aufnahmen / Eine Auswahl (1988), a split album by
Heinz & Franz and A.F. Moebius, documents two phases of
Bretschneider's electronic experiments under those two monikers.
Bretschneider then launched the solo project Komet with
Saat (Rastermusic, 1996), another electronic album but this time
devoted to a psychological study of rhythm.
If the midtempo minimal techno Gate is relatively straight-forward,
and Puls evokes a Dada-futuristic ballet,
there are compositions that turn and twist:
the sonata for videogame-like sounds
Welt
turns into a funk dance, and
Stalker
treats a female voice
to a horror atmosphere and an
industrial loop before turning into a syncopated dancefloor trance.
Chaotic glitches shape the soundscape of Saat (his first mature venture into glitch music), and the nine-minute Flut is an abstract
electronic fantasia that only at the end unveils a dance beat.
Komet displayed an uncanny sense of space and time, and contributed to defining the "clicks + cuts" aesthetics.
Flex (Rastermusic, 1997) seems more interested in simple structures like
the eleven-minute relentless locomotive Flex and the convoluted
nine-minute polka Real (the standout) than in creative and irregular formations such
as
the cryptic and foggy Stop and the deviant charleston Block.
After
the EP 20' To 2000 - January (Raster-Noton, 1999),
Komet released
Rausch (12k, 2000), possibly his most haunting work, the work that crowned
Bretschneider as a guru of minimal highly-processed glitch-techno music.
The protagonist is a crystal-sharp electronic ping-pong.
The highlights are
the cheerful polyrhythmic ticking of Licht
and the twitching Caribbean-tinged acceleration of Sog.
The slow dub-psychedelic reverbs Plus,
the shrill industrial loop of Band,
the lunar atmosphere of June
and even the sterile rhythmic geometry of Rausch
mark a vast territory, despite the limitations of the tool.
The alien signal that opens Blank slowly morphs into two beats that sound like (respectively) a heartbeat and a telephone pulse.
There is plenty of imagination in this "minimal" music.
Towards the end the album becomes repetitive, but the first eight compositions are enough to justify Bretschneider's reputation.
In parallel,
Bretschneider was a member of the trio Produkt with
Olaf "Byetone" Bender and Tilo "Tol" Seidel. Their
minimal techno is documented on
Float
(1996) and
Stretch
(1997).
Signal was another parallel project, another trio, this time with Carsten Nicolai and Byetone, documented on Centrum (2000) and Robotron (2007).
Komet's
Gold (Raster-Noton, 2003)
and Arc (Fallt, 2004) are no less sophisticated than the early works.
Under his own name, Frank Bretschneider released albums of
microscopic laptop music starting with
Rand (Mille Plateaux, 1999), still a bit too fragmented,
followed by the mature Curve (Mille Plateaux, 2001).
The twisted clock-like ticking of Blue and
the glitchy neurosis of Fall (the standout)
are two sides of the same painstakingly organized chaos.
If the nine-minute Silk is relatively user-friendly chill-out techno,
and the nine-minute Star is almost synth-pop,
the ten-minute Sat is a multi-layered industrial piece
Balance (Mille Plateaux, 2002) was a collaboration between Bretschneider and Taylor Deupree.
Bretschneider then released:
Aerial Riverseries (Whatness, 2002),
Party Of Two Parts (Underscan, 2003), which recycled (or, better, "looped") samples of his Komet project,
and the "love songs" of
Looping I-VI (12k, 2004), which are his most abstract structures.
Kippschwingungen (june 2007) documents a live performance for subharmonic sound generator.
Audio.NL (Korm Plastics, 2012) is a compilation of singles and rarities.
Under his own name Bretschneider released:
Rhythm (2007),
EXP (2010),
Komet (2011),
Kippschwingungen (2012),
Super.trigger (2013),
Sinn + Form (2015),
Isolation (2015),
Lunik (2018),
Sweet Water Pools (2019),
Con-Struct (2020) with Conrad Schnitzler,
Abtasten_halten (2020),
Pounding (2024),
etc.
Beispiel was the duo of Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek that recorded Muster (2022).
