Steve Hauschildt was always the quiet Emerald. While John Elliott was headbanging away to rhythms that only he could hear and Mark McGuire adopted the traditional grimace of rock'n'roll axemen since time immemorial, Hauschildt stood stock-still behind his synths, like a member of Kraftwerk who had strayed from the assembly line. Since the Cleveland synth-and-guitar trio's 2013 split, Elliott has poured his energies into his Spectrum Spools label's considerable output, and Mark McGuire has put out six or seven new records, some with a considerable shred quotient. Hauschildt, meanwhile, has mostly kept his head down. Last year he released S/H, a double-CD collection of studio experiments, live cuts, and CD-R favorites, but Where All Is Fled is his first album of new material since 2012's Sequitur. That album surprised many listeners, given the way that it balanced Hauschildt's customary ambient burble with pert drum-machine programming, vocoder, and synth-pop flourishes. But Where All Is Fled swings the pendulum back towards his sweet spot, musically speaking: gentle arpeggios, chiming leads, sunrise synths poised on the brink between sublimity and kitsch. It's his most emotionally potent offering yet, taking the gentle ecstasy of previous records and drawing it into a deep, soul-cleansing reverie.
Hauschildt lays all his cards out on the table with "Eyelids Gently Dreaming", a graceful piece built around a melodic chord progression, steady as an IV drip, that sounds a lot like Stars of the Lid—is the title a giveaway?—rendered with synthesizers instead of guitars and strings. "Anesthesia", a weightless shimmer that sounds like something off Cocteau Twins' Victorialand run through a very expensive reverb unit, suggests what you'd get if King Midas picked up an opiate habit. And the unabashedly sentimentalist title track wouldn't be out of place in an On Golden Pond reboot, what with its teary-eyed piano melody. Still, there's a strangeness to the overall sound—the piano pocked with stuttering artifacts, Fennesz-style distortion looming beneath—that sets it apart. Even when he's reaching for his hanky, he's careful to keep one hand on his synth, tweaking away in search of the perfect patch.
But it's not all so slow-moving; On tracks like "Vicinities", "Edgewater Prelude", and "The World Is Too Much With Us", Hauschildt channels his energy into arpeggios that spin like sparkling dynamos. "Arpeggiare" is particularly lively, with dizzying delay taps suggesting Frippertronics in zero-G. His newfound focus on pulse sometimes leads him to forms approaching a kind of drum-free dance music. The cosmic "Sundialed", with its wild, chromatic leaps, is not so far off from Lindstrom's super-saturated space disco, and "Caduceus" is reminiscent of John Beltran's Ten Days of Blue, Detroit Escalator Co.'s Black Buildings, and other examples of techno at its most yearning. And fans of Pub's "Summer", a now-obscure dub techno single from 2000, will be thrilled by how uncannily Hauschildt has recreated that song's watery bliss.
While it's true that much of the album represents a refinement of ideas and processes that Hauschildt has been playing with for years, at least one song, "Lifelike", points to possible avenues for further development. Like "Aqueuus", it's a wonderfully watery meditation on the kinetics of bubbles. Chimes and plucks peel off into rippling delay chains, and the shimmering melodic line suggests a lullaby for jellyfish; it's a picture of biology as rapture, of physics as ecstasy. We've always known that Hauschildt could make amazing sounds. The question, going into this album, was whether he could give them purpose and meaning—whether he could put his technical mastery into the service of music at once experimental and lyrical. Where All Is Fled answers resoundingly in the affirmative.
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