Peter Broderick - Grunewald

Drowned In Sound 80

The record itself was born in just one night inside the four walls of the discrete yet majestic Grunewald Church situated on the outskirts of Berlin, originally scouted by Nils Frahm as a location in which to record his album The Bells but which has now become a haven for an entire generation of contemporary composers.

Billed as 'an exploration of the alluring partnership between the acoustic space and Broderick's solo performance on piano and violin', it’s a collection of recordings which undoubtedly serve as an homage to a unique location and the natural interaction between the instruments and their surrounding environment. There’s something about Grunewald which is earthy and extremely human. A feeling of creative transmission, a sense of immersion and collaboration, as if all of the artists that have ever recorded and performed there have left some sort of watermark, a transference of hopeful energy that’s somehow burned its way deep inside this collection.

It all begins with a sparse and wintery opening on ‘Goodnight’, a breeze that whips through gaps in an old stone wall, a frost that creeps across the ground surrounding the old Grunewald Church. The rest of the EP follows suit, a haunting and Dickensian collection of tense strings which rise and fall, swell and race, colliding with the incredibly warm strains of the old Bösendorfer piano and the reverb-heavy surroundings. There’s no doubt it’s an evocative and crafted effort, and whilst it might not be setting the contemporary classical scene alight with anything revolutionary, it’s bursting with charm and an affection for its subject that’s impossible to ignore.

The production is itself is sumptuous in the extreme, each twinkling note and shift of the stool audible as keys are pressed and the piano hammer gently buffets against strings deep inside the chest of this grandest of old Austrian instruments. It lends an almost irrefutably Bavarian tinge to proceedings that feels alive with the darkness of the forest and the fairy tale magic of the Brothers Grimm. Bringing a welcome change of pace, ‘Violin Solo 1’ is harsh and icy, a tense Soviet dog-chase through the snow, serving as a brilliantly bleak winter alternative to the cheery colour of that perennial Christmas favourite, The Nutcracker. In comparison to the work on his last full length, the EP leans much more toward the instrumental and remains largely free of the stark vocals that were present there, but retaining all of the gutsy, thoughtful minimalism of his other compositional pieces. As with all of his playing, it’s expressive and emotionally astute without being overly sentimental – no mean feat, for certain.

Broderick is at his best here when layering cascading piano lines on the swirling and heady intensity of ‘It’s A Storm When I Sleep’, but there’s also room for reflection on the redemptive and wistful closing track ‘Eyes Closed and Traveling’, which coincidentally might just be the most enjoyable way to enjoy listening to this remarkable little collection of diverse and beautiful recordings.

Pitchfork 67

Composer Peter Broderick has spent the past ten years crafting consistently strong post-classical music, but on last August’s piano-only Partners he seemed to uncover a new gravitas and substance in his limpid, clear language. The inherent challenge with producing minimalistic music is figuring out how to infuse humanity and new ideas into work with only a handful of notes, and to avoid a reliance on vacant “prettiness.” On Partners, Broderick’s music remained stirring and evocative, but there was something new in it: a deeper injection of his personality, and a larger sense of how that plays into his relationship with his own compositions. Now, just a few months later, he returns with follow-up EP Grunewald, but rather than continue to expand on Partners’ developments, it sees him returning to the less vital, more ephemeral work of his past.

To be clear, Grunewald is less of a regression for Broderick than an amiable walk down memory lane. This graceful-but-slight release collects five tracks previously issued across two discs (one Japanese, one Taiwanese) that were taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin. Grunewald takes its name from a beloved local church which functioned as a hub for other Berlin-based experimentalists from the Erased Tapes label constellation like Nils Frahm, seeming to provide inspiration for all those who passed its door, including Broderick here. As a result, Grunewald is Broderick’s way of marking the importance of both the place and time in the lives of him and the other musicians who’ve been impacted by it.

Like Partners, Grunewald is an entirely solo effort, featuring Broderick unaccompanied on piano, violin, and—on the opener “Goodnight”—a bit of vocals. Broderick’s use of his voice on Partners provided one of that album’s highlights, an arresting cover of Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power’s “Sometimes.” On “Goodnight,” one of four piano-only numbers, he doesn’t quite sing as much as moan and coo on top of slow, plaintively struck chords. Broderick’s instincts for when to use vocals to enrich his minimalist performances are strong—sometimes he will even drop in a snippet of conversational speech, such as on Partners’ “Sometimes.” But the instrumentation of “Goodnight” is so bare and simple as to make it a trivial confection, more ambience than song. “Violin Solo, No. 1,” positioned as the middle of five tracks, provides another nice textural break amidst the four piano tracks, but is no more than advertised—a nice and brief minor key solo on violin.

The dark-night journey “Low Light” and the reflective “Eyes Closed and Traveling” offer entrancing melodies and more depth than “Goodnight,” but Grunewald’s clear highlight is “It’s a Storm When I Sleep.” Buoyed by Broderick’s thundering take on Alberti-style bass, he produces a cacophonous-yet-soothing drone that carries on for nearly eight minutes. A shorter version would have been interesting on its own, but stretched out here, it becomes formidable, challenging, and meditative. Though marooned amidst the lighter pieces here, it is suggestive of some of the new directions Broderick would take in making the leap from “pretty” to “profound.”