[ELECTRONIC/MINIMAL] Hauschka – ‘Abandoned City’ Album Review

[ELECTRONIC/MINIMAL] Hauschka – ‘Abandoned City’ Album Review

[ELECTRONIC/MINIMAL] Hauschka – ‘Abandoned City’ Album Review

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hauschka - abandoned city_post

I’m going to go out on a limb and trust that you, The Sights and Sounds reader, are going to be more than a little into Hauschka’s Abandoned City. Its scratchy, muted piano keys and barely-detectable production are probably not what your senses are accustomed to confronting. And musically Hauschka takes as much from classical-cum-experimental pianists as from IDM and more generally “electronica.” I’m going out on a limb here with you, reader. But it’s a safe assumption that Abandoned City will enchant you, since we at The Sights and Sounds have not only the best writers (yeah!), but we also have the best readers (yeah! [2]). I’m confident. And I’m giving it a shot.

The thing about listening to Hauschka’s piano-jamming is that you immediately forget you’re hearing a piano. There’s very little piano-ness to his music, and that’s partly because of the way he tweaks his piano in a slightly improvised way, and partly because of the layered sounds coming out of the production process. I mean, he also doesn’t play his instrument as if he knows he’s playing a piano. Hauschka has been known to strategically place duct tape, coins, toys, and other objects over his piano strings, all of which impart a distinct quality comprised of rattling, deafened, percussive sounds. All this would be rather flat if it weren’t for the layered supporting instruments – which vary all the way from soundboards to tambourines to strings. In a sense, this texturing gives additional dimensionality to what might otherwise be somewhat 2-dimensional hooks.

In Abandoned City Hauschka, true to style, unobtrusively offers some of the catchiest hooks I’ve heard in quite some time, reminding us why it’s often not worth changing your approach if you’ve already perfected it (he’s 10 albums deep now). Hauschka has always been a little blunt, straddling the classical and the contemporary, opting more for attention-grabbing hooks and sound effects rather than subtlety. Then again, this increases his appeal to those who are into other genres like electronica and indie, and justifies my writing his tunes here for you, dear reader.

Why are we overtaken with curiosity and amazement at abandoned cities? Is it because we readily imagine the human histories so closely connected with places? Does our ability to sympathize with another’s memory help us “see” the pasts, the place-based emotions, the hopes and desires and fears underlying the human condition? Does our ability to connect these images with human landscapes and music speak to the richness of our being human? Hauschka named this album “Abandoned City” and named most of the tracks after ghost towns around our small globe. In evoking the possible auditory experience one might have in these derelict places, Hauschka succeeds insofar as he “repopulates” them – he places the human elements back into the remaining physical-structural frameworks. He reminds us that even when cities have been abandoned, what still shines through in those places is the fact that there were once people there constructing meaning and memories, connecting hopes, fears, shared identities, and thriving in one anothers’ company.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsq6VpanuGE&w=560&h=315]

 

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