Hauschka: A Room to Expand

HauschkaHauschka is Dusseldorf-based Volker Bertelmann, here playing "prepared piano", generating a wide array of sounds and styles from his manipulations of strikers and strings. The work is most successful when he slows down, adding rough clicks and scrapes of the prepared hammers to soundtrackish meandering piano tunes. Many songs sound like the opening scene of a film in which it is raining, close-ups on puddles, water dripping down the window pane, a bored child sitting inside. At their best, the pieces are nostalgic Satie-inspired numbers with the oddness of added materials inside of the piano body. At their worst, the songs fail to escape the trappings of a rather trite electro-pop influence which mucks up the sprawling beauty and consideration of the slower pieces. "Old Man Playing Boules" and "One Wish" are stand-outs, though throughout the album one wishes for even more alteration of the piano, to really retune and tear the thing apart until it is something completely new, which would save it from its melancholic melodrama at times. The packaging should be mentioned as well, for the rather mid-90s American mid-west mediorce Emo-band album cover is forgiven by a found letter displayed inside, adding a strange side-story to this otherwise wordless instrumental album. :: Hauschka: A Room to Expand - Fat-Cat/Pias/RT