TRAGEDY & GEOMETRY

If you wonder what music to put on, when nothing´s on the telly and you aren´t improving your oboe skills in the slightest -and just want some time to yourself happily spent watching the colourful flashes radiating from your neon fish shoals - then look no further. This outing feels like the perfect soundtrack for small rainbow coloured cichlids zipping about in geometric shape-shifting patterns inside the miniature sea world of your aquarium.

Steve Hauschildt is a new boy on the block - at least to me that is. He´s been a member of electronic artist Emeralds for several years, where he´s explored many facets to this bubbly genre. Noise, ambient, Berliner Schule and a bunch of other different approaches. From what I´ve heard in Emeralds music, this new album of his called Tragedy & Geometry sounds altogether different. Hauschildt draws his inspiration from many of the head honchos of the progressive electronic world. I hear some references coming from the early Klaus Schulze albums - although they are hiding pretty well beneath the somewhat modern surface this album exudes, but they are there. The track Peroxide is a perfect example of this, where the synths form into thick electrically charged storm clouds of sound slowly percolating these giant breadths of oscillating soundscapes. I´d wish the album had more of these dreamy oozing tracks, where everything just flows.

The main inspiration here however, is Manuel Göttsching, and it becomes remarkably clear just how much of an inspiration his genius chessboard album from 1981 is to Hauschildt. These micro-tonal hypnotic beats, moving in minuscule slightly shifting patterns - like big oceanic waves of mosaic sounds - are indeed what drives this album. It´s like watching images of spheres and blurry looking planets illuminated by stroboscopic lighting. When you listen to this album whilst looking at the laser infected cover, the music suddenly swarms around the room like a private Who concert(remember those laser green accompaniments they had back in the day?) with grandiose light show and all - only here with electronic music as your sonorous mistress. The longest track here called Music for a Moiré Pattern shows how elegantly Hauschildt weaves these micro-tonal eccentricities into one another, and as a result of this he succeeds in doing something that is terribly difficult. He makes it sound like he was the originator of this rather fluid electronic movement, -even if Göttsching commenced it with his Early Water recordings from back in 76.

This is a very smooth and delightful album, which, had it been released some 30 years ago and trimmed down a bit, - would have deserved a big 4 star rating from yours truly. As it is, perhaps too long and slightly meandering, I´ll keep the one star lying comfortably on the bottom of my trouser pocket. Still, I think some people around here, have forgotten how wonderful and captivating a 3 star record can be, and this is surely one of those. I love listening to this, and it keeps my concentration revitalized and blooming like no other remedy could hope to achieve- filling my head with bubbling images of these entrancingly swarming shoals of fish.

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