Cleveland musician Steve Hauschildt crafts one of the finest electronic albums the year

Tragedy & Geometry is why we’re talking about Steve Hauschildt today. His first large-scale solo album is about to wash up on shore through Kranky – following a handful of odd-format releases on smaller imprints – and it will surely elevate his status to something other than, “Oh it’s that tall, quiet, skinny dude from Emeralds.”

While his day-job trio has taken the electronic underground by storm since five years – on keyboards Hauschildt is joined by John Elliott, while Mark Maguire flails away at his electric six-string – alone he delves into a more complex dissection of Kosmische Musik and its associated genres of ambient, experimental, and new age sounds. Bubbly synthesizer drones and complex notes jostle and slowly roll down gentle mountains and over fluffy clouds, occasionally jumping on a rhythmic freeway, in search of the sun, moon, rain, and ocean.

Steve Hauschildt has kept his ears close to the ground from his home base of Cleveland, Ohio, largely through his own Gneiss Things label, assembling a cast and crew of like-minded electronic romantics from across the continent, including Oneohtrix Point Never, Pulse Emitter and our own Le Révélateur.

While his hometown has produced a healthy number of similar-veined artists – think of Bee Mask, Radio People, etc. – he has harsh words about its cultural impact. “There is not an obvious resource or advantage in Cleveland that really inspires the artists here,” he mentions. “The situation has more to do with an almost utter lack of culture which animates certain artists with the proper motivation to seek out ideas in the mundane or surrounding detritus here.”

Steve Hauschildt
November 12^th | Casa del Popolo
4873, St.Laurent
with Driphouse, Le Révélateur and Souffle
www.myspace.com/stevehauschildt