A few weeks back I caught Sigur Rós at the Prospect Park Bandshell. As we waited for the band to take the stage, I was captivated by the textured music that played through the speakers. Piano based and built on repetition, it was like nothing I had heard before. I struggled and continue to struggle, to define the genre - ambient, neo-classical, avant-piano? Much like Sigur Rós, the music seemed to effortlessly exhume emotion, and transport the listener without them really realizing what had happened. And much like that night's headliner, the music seemed perfectly suited for a film soundtrack, while simultaneously needing no moving picture with which to ground itself. I "shazamed" the track, and the app turned up with an artist called Hauschka, an album called Ferndorf.
A little research turned up a classically trained German pianist / composer Volker Bertelmann, who is the man behind Hauschka. I have only begun to dig into a catalogue that adds up to 10 albums in 8 years, but I'm finding each one to be an adventure in sound, texture and emotion.
2005's The Prepared Piano
2007'a Room To Expand
2008's Snowflakes and Carwrecks
2010's Foreign Landscapes
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