The Austin 100: Daniel Brandt

By Stephen Thompson

Published March 5, 2019 at 5:01 AM EST

Hometown: Berlin, Germany

Genre: Electronic

Why We're Excited: Daniel Brandt is one-third of Brandt Brauer Frick, which has spent much of the last decade injecting dance music with orchestral instrumentation and a deeply experimentalist bent. So it's only natural that Brandt's solo albums would expand on those themes: On Channels, he explores ways of mixing minimalist techno, avant-garde classical music and the energy of a live band. In "Flamingo," he and his collaborators take a handful of discrete, spare elements — hypnotic taps on a piano, small orchestral flourishes, a skittering beat — and blends each into a concoction that builds to an enveloping throb.

Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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