Brandt Brauer Frick’s acoustic techno

Kanye West and German acoustic techno trio Brandt Brauer Frick share an affinity for ballerinas. About a month after the threesome posted its debut video for “Bop” in 2009, the rapper shared it on his blog. In it, girls pirouette gracefully to the song’s stuttering dance grooves. Drummer Daniel Brandt can’t help but draw a comparison to the spinning tutus in West’s film “Runaway,” which came out late last year. “He must have seen [our video], but it was a different approach so I’m not angry with him,” Brandt says when reached on his cell in Berlin in advance of the band’s inaugural U.S. tour kicking off at the Empty Bottle on Tuesday 8. We share a laugh at the possibility that the motif is a visual example of hip-hop’s sampling tradition.

Ballerinas aside, Brandt Brauer Frick’s video is a perfect showcase for its unique approach to dance music. As “Bop” unfolds, it builds layer by layer, with bassy Moog, percussion, dual piano lines, xylophone and even a rain stick. A decidedly untraditional techno tune, it still propels itself with an unmistakable four-four thump. “That’s what we wanted to show,” Brandt explains. “You can see how all the instruments come together and that it’s all real sounds.” Therein lies the key to Brandt Brauer Frick’s sound: It’s entirely acoustic and made from scratch.

Unlike other attempts to commingle classical and techno, the group does not compose its music electronically in the studio and then translate it for musicians to play live like “a techno guy getting an orchestra and trying to perform his original tracks in that setting.”

Working with up to ten musicians, Brandt Brauer Frick takes a club tune framework and fleshes it out with classical and jazz technique. At times it’s simply hyperactive piano lines flirting with tight drums and a bouncing stand-up bass, as on “Paparazzi.” Elsewhere it’s more fully realized with strings, brass, woodwinds and harp, as on the highly syncopated “Teufelsleiter.”

Brandt Brauer Frick’s first album, You Make Me Real, has seen a storm of positive press, landing the trio spots on the lineups at both Coachella and South by Southwest. Brandt credits the band’s years of training (and love of electronic music) for its broad appeal.

Trained on piano and percussion since they were toddlers, all three began studying music and composition before high school. “I started playing classical stuff but didn’t really like it because you couldn’t jam around. It was just learning songs,” Brandt says. He met Jan Brauer, now 26, early on. The two have played together in and out of school since they were teenagers, and both started buying dance records around the same time. In 2008, the pair approached pianist Paul Frick, 31, who until that point was working almost strictly in the classical realm.

They bonded over a shared love of everything from classical experimentalist Steve Reich to left-field electronic mind Herbert to Detroit techno legend Jeff Mills, who all have more in common than you’d initially think. “There is a big parallel in the melodic patterns,” Brandt explains. “If you listen to old Jeff Mills, he has a symphonic approach. Techno also has a lot in common with the music of Steve Reich, which is very loop-based.”

But whereas artists like Reich and Herbert have a religiouslike zeal for their musical philosophies, Brandt Brauer Frick likes to keep it loose. “We just jam around,” Brandt says. “We don’t really start by saying, Hey, we’re going to make some classical techno now. We are just making what we want to and then it happens.”

Brandt Brauer Frick unplugs at Empty Bottle on Tue 8.