Review
Genre and Mood
Brandt Brauer Frick play techno with an acoustic ensemble, and on Pretend they hand the microphone to Emika. It is electronic, minimal and techno in form, made with acoustic instruments rather than only electronic tools. The feelings named here, hypnotic and intense, follow the critics: the Quietus heard something strangely fluid, the Line of Best Fit something increasingly frantic.
Song Summary
Pretend is one of the new songs on Mr. Machine, released by !K7 on 24 October 2011, an album on which the trio also re-recorded tracks from their 2010 debut You Make Me Real for their ensemble. The song is Emika’s: she is credited as its composer and lyricist, and her vocal appears in modified form on her own debut album. The Line of Best Fit called the result a remix-cum-cover of her original.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the track’s shape rather than a timeline, so the breakdown follows that shape.
Intro
The Quietus heard the ensemble build “a dense mesh of percussion and struck melodies”. Listen for where the first figure comes from: wood, skin or string.
Build-up
For the Line of Best Fit, the track is a seven-minute series of crescendo and diminuendo: figures introduced, repeated, warped and returned to the mix. Emika’s detached vocal sits over “taut aquatic percussion”, in PopMatters’ words.
Climax
The build ends in “a swell of dramatic strings”, and the Line of Best Fit heard violins scratched at with something approaching full-blown violence.
Outro
No source describes how the track ends. Listen for which figure is the last to go.
Concepts in Focus
A four-on-the-floor beat puts the kick on every beat of the bar. In Pretend it is played by people, and the Quietus found the whole “strangely fluid despite the rigid 4/4 drum beat”: the pulse is strict, the hands around it are not.
The track is a long build-up, or rather several: tension that rises, falls back and rises again, until the strings take over.
It also shows how flexible a remix can be. Brandt Brauer Frick remixed Emika’s Pretend, released by Ninja Tune as a single in September 2011, and their version is close to a cover, a new arrangement around her vocal. Soul Clap then remixed theirs.
Artistic Context
Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer and Paul Frick formed the group in Wiesbaden in 2008, combining the formulas of dance music with new classical music; after moving to !K7 they played live as the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble. Emika, born Ema Jolly in Milton Keynes in 1986 and based in Berlin since 2006, has a mother from Příbram.
Impact and Reception
The Line of Best Fit called Pretend “one of the very best tracks” it had posted as a Song of the Day; PopMatters gave Mr. Machine seven out of ten and named Pretend one of its most compulsively danceable moments. Play it loud enough to hear the hands behind the beat.
