Grandbrothers have made a career out of spurning tradition. Formed in Düsseldorf, Germany, the piano duo creates richly textured music that straddles the boundaries between ambient, minimalism, and electronic music. The result is always different, yet always centered around the unique collaboration between German-Turkish pianist Erol Sarp and Swiss engineer/software designer Lukas Vogel. Across four albums—2015’s Dilation, 2017’s Open, 2021’s All The Unknown, and 2023’s Late Reflections—the duo has drawn peculiar inspiration from what others may regard as a limitation: every sound, every note, somehow originates from one instrument, the grand piano.

That doesn’t mean every component of Grandbrothers’ music sounds like a piano—merely that it’s the sonic bed for their bold experiments, an inventive approach that has sometimes been described as “open heart surgery on a grand.” “We use the piano as a sound source, and then we go with digital effects and manipulate it further,” explains Sarp.

At its core, Grandbrothers’ music represents a communion between the old and the new: the exquisite melodies of piano-based minimalism, the beat-driven energy of electronica.