HAUSCHKA
Snowflakes and Carwrecks
(Fat Cat)
By Brandon Bussolini
Sometimes, a listener can correctly infer a lot from an album’s artwork. The cover of Snowflakes and Carwrecks, the follow-up EP to last year’s full-length Ferndorf (130701), maintains a Bauhaus-meets-art deco style, but substitutes a winter scene for the sunset and bather that graced the LP. Taking descriptions of Ferndorf at face value risked overheated nostalgia - the album’s inspiration was, after all, composer Volker Bertelmann’s upbringing in rural Germany.
Actually listening to it was something else altogether: these compositions for prepared piano and chamber orchestra ride the minimalist pulse of non-suck Philip Glass minimalism with worthy little melodies that aspire to the repetitive potency of Erik Satie’s Vexations or the Buddha Machine. Neither snobby or pandering, the album was the sort that’s easy to imagine, but hard to find.
Accordingly, it’s the sort of album that’s easier to praise than make time for. I play it during shifts at a café, and as noncontroversial background music I can say it’s nonpareil, but also the sort of music that feels vulgar next to a decent amount of movement and exertion. “Heimat,” the full-length's high point of contemplativeness, sounds best suited for playing at extremely low volume in a sad but dignified brasserie.
Although Snowflakes and Carwrecks doesn’t contrast with the disc that came before it as Ferndorf does with the primarily piano-led Hauscka records that precede it, it’s a pricklier listen.
Formally, the two records are pretty much identical: compositions revolve around slow-developing melodic lines, hypnotically insistent piano figures, and strings that either mimic the songs’ churning rhythmic backbone or soar above it. Running the risk of literalism, Snowflakes and Carwrecks simply sounds and feels colder than its late summer/early autumn cousin (Ferndorf was released in September).
The differences are slight and telling: most indicatively, the longest track on the EP is almost the same length as the two longest tracks on the full length added together. On most songs, percussion precedes melody, and the electronic flourishes that occasionally cropped up on Ferndorf are all but absent. Many of the tracks feel like underdeveloped ideas, and my thinking about the record’s role is pretty evenly split: it could just as believably be a collection of odds and ends that didn’t fit in with Ferndorf’s brisk, succinct statements as a more abstract and interior complement, signaling another digression in Bertelmann’s discography.
Most of the time, it sounds like the performers themselves don’t know. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, as “Eisblume” uses about half of its seven-minute length to explore the cello’s expressive and timbral range when let loose over an extrapolated melodic line, untethered from the typewriter pulse best exemplified by Snowflakes’ most accessible track, “Wonder.”
The majority of the songs here have moments to recommend them, but occasional aimlessness is Kryptonite to music this intentionally pretty. The middle section of “Tanz,” a reel in search of a country and a peasantry, fares the worst, with a soggy middle section where the musicians circle around each other in an attempt to rally around an idea worth pursuing. The idea never materializes, and they make a couple distracting mistakes before finding refuge in some unfortunate minimalist clichés.
The biggest disappointment of Snowflakes and Carwrecks, apart from the waste of a great title, is that the music is neither dull enough to safely ignore nor interesting enough to sustain attention. Try to ignore it, and it determinedly putters along, tugging at your attention but never bringing anything really nourishing into your peripheral vision. Pay too close attention, and the music just sounds like disciples of Satie and Terry Riley jamming behind their masters’ backs, sometimes at cross-purposes.
I don’t mean to say it’s hopeless. Michelangelo Antonioni joked that he took the bicycle out of Italian neorealism, and it’s generally understood he meant the sentimentality and concern with the working class that characterized the De Sica film. I wonder if Bertelmann hasn’t just removed the bicycle from his music, if only temporarily. The first song on Ferndorf was titled, incidentally, “The Blue Bicycle.”
But the Di Chirico-esque dreaminess that always competed with and most often triumphed over narrative in Antonioni’s films has yet to find an aural equivalent in Hauschka’s sound. For the most part, Hauschka makes no attempt at novelty outside of the context of his own back catalog. You’re likely and liable to get as much out of Ferndorf as you put into it.
Snowflakes and Carwrecks is a less efficient machine; the returns, less attractive. if that turns you off, though, you’ve probably got several other albums queued up. I think I’ll put this one of the shelf - it’s got the potential to be a grower, depending on where Hauscka goes with his next release.
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