Steve Hauschildt, ‘Where All Is Fled’
A bit of orientation: referencing a tradition in electronic music with an intense cult following, Kranky calls Where All Is Fled “a modern kosmiche milepost.” Hauschildt’s former group, Emeralds, has its own deeply devoted fanbase and its own complex universe of musical influences. So Where All Is Fled is exactly the kind of album that welcomes discussion of its creator’s past work and the album’s deep catalog of references to electronic music history. But that means it’s also easy to risk treating Where All Is Fled as a niche concern, to make discussions of the music’s context supersede the richness of the music itself. I want to push back against that impulse. I don’t have anything that even remotely resembles an expert knowledge of kosmiche or Emeralds. If you’re already a fan of either, chances are you’re going to like this album a lot. But even if — especially if! — you’re like me and have listened to almost nothing that Hauschildt or his former Emeralds bandmates have recorded before this, there’s a lot here to love. It’s too unpredictable to be wallpaper music, too heartbreaking to be an academic exercise. It’s not trying to impress you. It seeks to move you.
So let’s make our way into the expanses of Where All Is Fled. By the time we get to the other side, we’ll have found new entrances into the territory of Hauschildt’s music — and even some of the landmarks that shaped it. The journey starts with “Eyelids Gently Dreaming,” which expands slowly and drifts like a cool breeze until it segues into “Arpeggiare” and starts to take a more rhythmically assertive turn. Even in the record’s first ten minutes, the music’s melancholy and drama unfurls with classical grandeur, but it’s never overwhelming or aggressive. Yet it isn’t exactly passive either. It’s understated, attentive, filled with wonder. It shines, casting off more brilliant sparks all the time. It bends time, as textures from 80s science education films return in updated forms or coalesce with newer electronic sounds.
In Richard Powers’ novel Orfeo, the protagonist Peter Els says again and again, “Music isn’t about things. Music is things.” Like many early kosmiche musicians, Els spends the 1960s and 1970s dazzled by the ways electronic music seems to announce an ecstatic and enchanted future. Kosmiche arose during a time when so many people were trying to cast off the trauma of previous war-torn generations, pursue the solace of inner experience, reimagine love as a universal value, and reach into space for signs of an intelligent universe. With analog machines that generated perfect arpeggios, beautiful timbres, and warm drones, no wonder kosmiche could become the soundtrack to dreams of a more peaceful and adventurous future. No wonder some musicians and listeners from successive generations have continued to look back at hallmarks of the genre for inspiration.
But where a lot of music might be about things like peace and love, Where All Is Fled is things — things that are harder to name than peace and love but include them. By the time we reach the album’s second half, the landscape we’re in looks even more dynamic and complex. The dramatic urgency at the beginning of the album gradually gives way to playfulness. The music flows and ebbs, sinking back into languid piano lines on the title track or even rolling in with full-fledged beats on “Aequus.” It opens up in a burst of energy during “The World Is Too Much with Us,” then it glimmers during “Sundials” and “Lifelike.” The album fades away in windswept and wistful fashion, but between the first and last songs is a vast, fluctuating terrain. The album has such a wide emotional range that a label like kosmiche doesn’t contain it. Joy, sadness, anxiety, calm — it’s all here for us to encounter. The borders of Where All Is Fled are porous enough to let all of us find a way in.
