Steve Hauschildt

The Graham Foundation

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610

New work and a novel direction from Steve Hauschildt (Ex-Emeralds). For Lampo, the Cleveland-based artist premieres music made in part by gesture—translating movement into sound and, he writes, “conducting the music in a three-dimensional field.”

Here, Hauschildt uses the Buchla Lightning for the first time. This specialized controller was designed by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla and operates on the principles of optical triangulation. It works by spatially sensing the horizontal and vertical movement of tiny infrared transmitters that are built into two wands. As the wands are moved in space, data such as velocity, acceleration and pitch is tracked. This data is then transformed into MIDI information and sent directly to his synthesizers and electronics, allowing Hauschildt to control the system through gesture as opposed to a traditional keyboard.

Steve Hauschildt (b.1984, Cleveland, Ohio) is an electronic musician and founding member of the band Emeralds (2006-2013). He has performed at numerous festivals and venues across North America, Europe and Japan. In 2011, his debut full-length recording, Tragedy & Geometry (Kranky) was a post-kosmische album that referenced the Greek muses Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy) and Polyhymnia (Muse of Geometry) as inspiration. The album was an audio treatise on the general disposability of technology, expressed through the re-appropriation of stylistic conventions across electronic music. His 2012 studio album Sequitur (Latin for “it follows”) featured nearly 20 different electronic instruments ranging from the 1960s to the present. He cited the work of Donna Haraway, Camille Paglia and Rosalind Picard as being conceptually influential on the compositions. In 2013, Editions Mego released S/H, an anthology of unreleased and rare works from Hauschildt’s archives. Consisting of 37 tracks across two discs, it provides a thorough overview of his work from 2005-2012. To a degree, Hauschildt’s compositions are intuitive yet grounded in the past, as they preserve the legacy of electronic music and Minimalism. However, his work also explores the domain of the avant-garde through experimentation with synthesizers and digital processing. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, Hollywood sound designer/composer Alan Howarth and Aaron Dilloway of Wolf Eyes, among others.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation