Steve Hauschildt

STEVE HAUSCHILDT “Nonlin” [ARTPL-122]


Artist: Steve Hauschildt
Title: Nonlin

Label: PLANCHA / Ghostly International
Cat#: ARTPL-122 / GI-346J
Format: CD

※国内流通仕様盤

Release Date: 2019.11.15
Price(CD): 2,200 yen + tax


元Emeraldsで、現在はシカゴを拠点に活動しているコンテンポラリー・エレクトロニック・アーティスト、Steve HauschildtのGhostly移籍後2作目となる新作が早くも完成。さらにサウンドの裾野を広げた印象の秀逸なエレクトロニック・ミュージック!

元Emeraldsで、現在はシカゴを拠点に活動しているコンテンポラリー・エレクトロニック・アーティスト、Steve Hauschildt。Emeralds在籍中からソロ活動をし、デジタル・プロセッシング、コンピューター、シンセを駆使したポスト・コズミック・スタイルのアンビエント・テクノ、アルペジオ調のエレクトロニカを披露し、高い評価を得てきた。

以前はKrankyから作品をリリースしてきたが、2018年の前作からGhostlyへと移籍。
そして、早くもGhostlyからの2作目が完成した。
シカゴ、ロサンゼルス、ニューヨーク、トビリシ、ブリュッセルなどでツアーの合間を縫って録音された本作は、前作の延長線上でありながらも、より自由度が高く聴き応えのある内容に仕上がっている。メロディアスな展開に不協和な音を織り交ぜてシルキーなリヴァーヴや変調するなエレクトロニック・ビートが効果的に配され、ドローン、ミニマル、アンビエント、エレクトロニカなどを鮮やかに横断してくかのよう。「Reverse Culture Music」ではWhitneyの新作にも参加していたシカゴのチェリスト、Lia Kohlをフィーチャーし、チェロのクラシカルなフレーズにミニマルなシンセに融合させ、エレガントながらメランコリックなムードを描き出す。

さらにサウンドの裾野を広げた印象で、冒頭からその音世界に引き込まれる秀逸な作品。

Chicago-based contemporary electronic musician Steve Hauschildt has composed panoramas of synthesized sound for over a decade. First within his former band, Emeralds, an American touchstone of 2000s home-recorded psychedelic noise music, and later across a steady and critically-acclaimed stream of solo releases spanning ambient techno, arpeggiated electronica and post-kosmische styles utilizing synthesizers, computers, and digital processing. In 2018, he extended a collection of rich, visceral tracks titled Dissolvi, his first release on Ghostly International and his most collaborative work to date. Just a year later, Hauschildt returns with Nonlin, an album that’s freer, leaner, and looser, both structurally and conceptually; less linear compared to its predecessor, but still captivating. Developed and recorded in several studios during and around the edges of tour — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Tbilisi, and Brussels — this material emulates an alienating encounter with a smattering of places, a replicant of culture shock, a solitary and stark experience with uncanny environments, melody and dissonance as oblique locales.

Nonlin finds Hauschildt evolving his palette of tools, integrating modular and granular synthesis. The improvisatory and generative nature of modular systems, when paired with his signature grid-oriented and hand-played techniques, guides these compositions slightly out of line to hypnotic effect. Opener “Cloudloss” permeates the mix with an unsettling smog, which reappears and all but engulfs “A Planet Left Behind.” On cuts like “Attractor B” and “Subtractive Skies,” pockets of air rest between sequenced pulses, whose crumpling and flattening folds build into a restrained rapture of crisp frequencies and milky reverb-swallowed coruscations.

The album’s title track and centerpiece logs on to a foreign network, a fractured percussion signal that modulates and stutters into static amidst curious melodic sparkling in the hazy bandwidth. “Reverse Culture Music” casts an elegant and brooding stream of strings, pizzicato and churning bow from Chicago cellist Lia Kohl, against chiming minimalist synth frameworks. A surprising pattern emerges in the taciturn systems at work. Hauschildt continues to expand his already horizon-wide repertoire, here exploring the effects of corrupting coordinates; a flight subject to the collapsable abilities of time in remote spaces, a smearing of the axis to elegiac ends.


TRACK LIST:

01. Cloudloss
02. Subtractive Skies
03. A Planet Left Behind
04. Attractor B
05. The Nature Remaining
06. Nonlin
07. Reverse Culture Music
08. The Spring in Chartreuse
09. American Spiral


Steve Hauschildt

Photo by Maria Tzeka

Photo by Maria Tzeka

Emeraldsのメンバーとして2000年代中期から活動を開始し、それと並行してソロ活動も行う。Emeraldsの活動中にKrankyから2作「Tragedy & Geometry」(2011)「Sequitur」(2012)のアルバムをリリースし、解散後はソロ活動に専念し、Krankyから『Where All Is Fled』(2015)、『Strands』(2016)2作をリリースし、2018年にはGhostlyへと移籍し、「Dissolvi」をリリースした。デジタル・プロセッシング、コンピューター、シンセを駆使したポスト・コズミック・スタイルのアンビエント・テクノ〜アルペジオ調のエレクトロニカはジャンルの垣根を越えて注目されている。

Chicago-based electronic musician Steve Hauschildt has composed minimal sounds at extraordinary levels for over a decade. First within his former band, Emeralds, an American touchstone of 2000s home-recorded psychedelic noise music, and later across a steady and critically-acclaimed stream of solo releases. As a live performer, he explores the intersection of experimental music and video art, having toured heavily across North America, Europe, and Asia. As a recording artist, Hauschildt utilizes synthesizers, computers, and digital processing to continuously transmute and evolve modes of electronic music.

In 2011, he released his debut full-length with Kranky Records, Tragedy & Geometry, a post-kosmische album inspired by Greek muses and the disposability of technology. His next LP in 2012, Sequitur, was recorded in Vancouver and featured nearly 20 different synthesizers spanning the last five decades. In 2013, Editions Mego released S/H, an extensive anthology of rare and unreleased works from Hauschildt’s archives (2005-2012). Additionally, he co-curated a compilation for the Air Texture series in 2014.

In 2015, Hauschildt completed the cascading full-length Where All Is Fled. Both its artwork and its music found inspiration from surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions. The following year’s Strands, his fourth release with Kranky, presented what Hauschildt called “a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths.” He approached compositions like malleable fibers of a unified whole, like strands of rope. Reflecting on his hometown of Cleveland, Hauschildt focused the gritty, decaying compositions upon “the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry.”

With Dissolvi, his first release on Ghostly International and his most collaborative work to date — featuring Julianna Barwick, GABI, and a broader set of instrumentation overall — Hauschildt extends a vast, vibrating framework in which to consider the state of being. Songs are cerebral in orientation, but beyond explanation — references to solipsistic desires, modern-day surveillance, and physiological phenomena abound — the music is truly visceral and profoundly rich.


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