STEVE HAUSCHILDT
Territories: Worldwide
“A commonly respected feature of an ambient record is that you can forget about it and just let it color your life. Nonlin is not that. It’s asking you to notice the cracks in the structure and the tension caused by them. It wants to show all its parts, not hide them. It’s a more challenging record, for that reason, but it’s also one of the more rewarding listens of Hauschildt’s career” – POP MATTERS
“the compositions on Nonlin provide depth and passion enough to show the listener more of the journey each time. They create a unique world through which Hauschildt guides the listener with a sense of gentleness and wonder, like a helping hand showing the way in the darkness” – EXCLAIM
Electronic musician Steve Hauschildt (currently based in Tbilisi) has composed minimal sounds at extraordinary levels for over a decade. First within his former band, Emeralds, an American touchstone of 2000s home-recorded psychedelic noise music, and later across a steady and critically-acclaimed stream of solo releases. As a live performer, he explores the intersection of experimental music and video art, having toured heavily across North America, Europe, and Asia. As a recording artist, Hauschildt utilizes synthesizers, computers, and digital processing to continuously transmute and evolve modes of electronic music.
In 2011, he released his debut full-length with Kranky Records, Tragedy & Geometry, a post-kosmische album inspired by Greek muses and the disposability of technology. His next LP in 2012, Sequitur, was recorded in Vancouver and featured nearly 20 different synthesizers spanning the last five decades. In 2013, Editions Mego released S/H, an extensive anthology of rare and unreleased works from Hauschildt’s archives (2005-2012). Additionally, he co-curated a compilation for the Air Texture series in 2014.
In 2015, Hauschildt completed the cascading full-length Where All Is Fled. Both its artwork and its music found inspiration from surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions. The following year’s Strands, his fourth release with Kranky, presented what Hauschildt called “a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths.” He approached compositions like malleable fibers of a unified whole, like strands of rope. Reflecting on his hometown of Cleveland, Hauschildt focused the gritty, decaying compositions upon “the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry.”
With Dissolvi, his first release on Ghostly International (August 2018) and his most collaborative work to date — featuring Julianna Barwick, GABI, and a broader set of instrumentation overall — Hauschildt extends a vast, vibrating framework in which to consider the state of being. Songs are cerebral in orientation, but beyond explanation — references to solipsistic desires, modern-day surveillance, and physiological phenomena abound — the music is truly visceral and profoundly rich.
Just a year later, Hauschildt returns with Nonlin, an album that’s freer, leaner, and looser, both structurally and conceptually; less linear compared to its predecessor, but still captivating. Developed and recorded in several studios during and around the edges of tour — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Tbilisi, and Brussels — this material emulates an alienating encounter with a smattering of places, a replicant of culture shock, a solitary and stark experience with uncanny environments, melody and dissonance as oblique locales.
Steve Hauschildt returns after 6 years with a new album titled Aeropsia. After a transcontinental relocation from the US to Tbilisi, Georgia, the electronic composer emerges from a personal and global transformation to explore themes of perceptual distortion, disconnection, and renewal. Aeropsia (which roughly translates as “seeing the air”) refers to a visual phenomenon in which objects appear to float or shimmer, often due to changes in pressure, perception, atmospheric shifts or neurological disturbance. This becomes a metaphor for the liminality that informs the record: blurry visions, dreamlike displacements, and the fragile membrane separating what is seen from what is felt. In the years since his last solo release, Hauschildt’s world has been marked by relocation and a growing sense of global turbulence. These experiences became the raw material for a work that navigates institutional haze and uncertainty itself. The result is music that employs decay as method, structure as entropy, and mutation as expression. While Aeropsia remains subjective in its vision, Hauschildt invited two previous collaborators to expand the album’s gravitational pull. Cellist Lia Kohl, who previously performed on Nonlin, returns and brings a textural warmth to select tracks, while guitarist Michael Vallera threads spectral harmonics into the mix. The album’s electronic foundation and its tactile elements meet in a state of luminous suspension to navigate the shifting in physical and psychological terrain.