Manipulations for the think tank dance floor: avant-garde dance pop on a prepared piano.
The most important utensil in music history? Gaffer tape. Without onlookers there is chaos on the stages and a recording studio cannot be operated. Gaffer marks, Gaffer holds together what would fly apart. Gaffer tape is the glue of rock and pop music. As befits a sound researcher and recent Oscar winner, Volker Bertelmann is taking the material further.
The man who calls himself Hauschka uses Gaffer to get the vibrations out of his piano. He manipulates the machine called the piano, turns sounds that remain stationary into a sound between tone, material and percussion – and thus creates the sound of PHILANTHROPY: a melodic-rhythmic minimalism that is based on order and structure. This music is suitable for dancing, also because the organization of techno plays a major role at Hauschka; Samuli Kosminen from the Icelandic group Múm can also be heard as drummer on some tracks.
The Hauschka sound can also be dissected theoretically with a lot of fun, keeping in mind the thesis of the chief minimalist Steve Reich, according to which the smallest shifts achieve the greatest effects. PHILANTHROPY is the Düsseldorf native’s first record after winning an Oscar for the soundtrack to “Nothing New in the West”. So he is sure to get attention. And Bertelmann is seizing the opportunity by strengthening the Hauschka brand core.