Steve Hauschildt – Strands – Album Review by Peter McNally

It’s very hard to talk about ambient electronic music without lapsing into the kind of descriptive lexicon most commonly associated with the gratingly new–age. Adrift from the signs and signifiers of traditional song structure and lyrical narrative, it’s very easy to rely a little too readily on the images of babbling brooks and crashing waves that this form of music can often evoke in the mind – a crutch I will lean heavily on in the review to come. This might be because, at its best, the flowing atmospheric textures and electronically generated soundscapes of good ambient–electronica can engage the mind in a way that a guitar-bass-and drums reliant combo often can not (exceptions will be made for the likes of Sigur Ros and God Speed You! Black Emperor) and can evoke something of the sublime, that indescribable and terrifyingly beautiful vastness of the natural world, or of imagined and fantastic alien worlds. Or, it could all be in your fucking mind!

It’s comforting then, to know that on his most recent effort Strands, Steve Hauschildt was indeed attempting to convey some big ideas, some sublime imagery, with his meticulously assembled compositions. According to Hauschildt, the album “is a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths… the moment in nature and society where life slowly re–emerges through desolation.” The resulting album can be broken into two halves, with the turning point placed around third track, ‘Ketracel’. Before this point the sounds conjure up images of a vacant world, happily going about its business in the absence of humanity.

‘Horizon of Appearances’ envelops the listener like the darkness of an underground cave, providing its own emotional journey in three acts. Water drips, and distant vocoder–enhanced robotic voices chirp along to Vangelis–synths before it ends on a muted note. Unlike the oppressive stillness of ‘Horizon…’, second track ‘Same River Twice’ is moving and kinetic, like rushing water. The metallic arpeggios sound like treated kettle drums and it’s anchored by a deep throbbing bass until, again, it dissipates into the air in a fluttering of notes and elegiac chorus. If the initial journey began in a still cave and then followed a flowing river, third track ‘A False Seeming’ is where we reach the estuary. It sounds like waves creeping up the shoreline, the static white noise of the sea rising. It’s a beautiful but almost inconsequential track between the rush of ‘Same River…’ and the hammering synths of ‘Ketracel.’

‘Ketracel’ is where everything that has been explored beforehand seems to come together. Static waves and disembodied voices float over and in–between glitchy, percussive arpeggios and, for the first time, the music seems desperate and dramatic. Now unconcerned with solely trying to convey the sublime, a narrative appears to be pulling loose of the static and hum – life finally raising its brazen head. ‘Time We Have’ has a gorgeous chord progression that sits well as a companion piece with ‘A False Seeming’. This track is perhaps the most economic encapsulation of Hauschildt’s interest in the collapse and rise, as the melody gives way to a fuzzy, distorted decay, only to rise out of it almost hymn–like – battling the broken speaker crackle upwards until it eases back to earth, where title track, ‘Strands’, bubbles along in the primordial ooze. ‘Strands’ is hopeful and optimistic – more human – all of the elements are balanced and harmonious in an elegantly clear production.

The most human song on the album, ‘Transience of Earthly Joys’, is a lament, like a lost waltz echoing out of the past. Over a mournful and reverb drenched piano, rising synths consume the swirling chords in eerie shrieks before dissipating briefly as the melody fights back, only to become further lost in a distorted metallic counter melody – angelic voices adrift in a sea of static.

The album ends on a relatively subdued, yet comfortably optimistic note with ‘Die In Fascination.’ Here, Hauschildt turns one of the record’s most obvious chord progressions into one of its most subtly sublime moments. The distorted synths sparkle and rise as the sequence loops, until we’re all floating free in blissful harmony.

Or, you know, it could all be in your fucking mind!

There is very little in the way of obviously new sounds on Strands. In fact, some of the chiming synths sound positively retro. Though not quite as obviously sourced as the garishly neon John Carpenter tribute of recent ambient heroes, S U R V I V E, it’s hard to believe that something like Aphex Twin’s early Selected Ambient Works, the echo–drenched wash of Stars of the Lid, or more recently Fennesz’ Venice, have not been an influence on Haschildt’s palette. No matter, the results are fucking beautiful!

In the end, Strands is a more expansive and considered work than Hauschildt’s previous album, Where All Is Fled. That record still held traces of his work with Emeralds, though hinted at the promisingly new – near beat–less – direction his solo work would take. This also means that there is nothing as outright fun as some of Haushchildt’s earlier work, like ‘Mixed Messages’ from 2012’s Sequitur. Strands, on the other hand, is a much grander endeavour that arrives almost entirely untethered to the past and, because of this, it is initially more difficult to get a solid grip on. However, repeated listens reward the listener with subtle changes in tone, mood and surgically EQ’d and affected sounds that add up to a more complex but altogether more rewarding journey.

Track List:

1. Horizon of Appearances
2. Same River Twice
3. A False Seeming
4. Ketracel
5. Time We Have
6. Strands
7. Transience of Earthly Joys
8. Die in Fascination

Strands