HAUSCHKA - What If

With an eloquent, very Italian gesture, I waved my forearms and exclaimed: "Finally!". It happened within a few seconds, and again within five minutes, giving me yet another chance to be amazed by the ever-skilled, but never so determined, Volker "Hauschka" Bertelmann.

The rigorous architecture of "Abandoned City" — along with its superfluous corollary "A NDO C Y", featuring various remixes and discarded tracks — risked consigning him to the ranks of soulless talents, so pleased with their own virtuosity that they fail to notice themselves slowly slipping into superficiality.

That isn't the case with the previously unreleased material collected on "What If", the first half of which was made with the valuable technical assistance of Francesco Donadello at his Berlin studio: here Bertelmann worked on live recordings of a number of improvisations, later enriched using an overdubbing method typical of Hauschka's "interlocking" sound.

After a prologue steeped in the nu-jazz of BADBADNOTGOOD, on the Rileyan “Constant Growth Fails” and on “My Kids Live On Mars” the pianist manages to pull his forces together into pulsating tracks where acoustic and electronic elements relate on a perfectly equal footing, often blurring into one another amid the whirl of player pianos – the real novelty of this studio effort.

As if they had metaphorically shifted from curious objects to polished design products, the compositions remain captivating even where their construction is strikingly regular and plain to see: like a beginner's lesson in engineering, “Nature Fights Back” lays out its rhythmic-harmonic segments one after another, and in doing so returns to the minimalist tradition of an “objectified” music that resolves itself within its own process.

It can't be denied that the exuberance of the opening tracks gives way to a slightly subdued second half, heralded by the post-classical intimacy of “I Can't Express My Deep Love” – though it's still shot through with icy digital jolts. Back in his Du00fcsseldorf studio, Bertelmann amuses himself with an ultra-modern Yamaha Disklavier, capable of translating analogue musical action into a MIDI duplicate. Reflective and airy, these pieces have the merit of revealing the pianist's discreet taste for experimentation, a trait that also guides the two bonus tracks reserved for the "liquid" format edition, which are genuinely enjoyable.

Credit is due to Hauschka for the courage of steering his meticulous mechanism off the beaten track, where it would inevitably end up jamming at the crucial moment. Now everything is starting to run smoothly and the faulty gears are gradually disappearing: artistic maturity may well be just around the corner.

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12/04/2017