Steve Hauschildt

Emeralds co-pilot Steve Hauschildt follows up his 'Tragedy & Geometry' album for Kranky with the plush new age disco dreamscapes of 'Sequitur'. Arguably, Steve is the lazy one in Emeralds, conjuring only three solo album to date compared with the gazillion respective works from bandmates John Elliot and Mark McGuire. But, as evidenced here and previously, he's also the canniest and most pop-wise, honing a more concise, richly rhythmic and melodic style of composition still rooted in cerebral concepts: "I feel that the album in a sense treads the imaginary boundary between Nature and Artifice. It is postmodern, but not necessarily a post-Freudian statement on cyborg theory or feminism. Rather it is a musically mimetic domain where these ideas freely collide and coalesce". Commanding a 20-piece arsenal including Crumar Orchestrator 2, EDP Wasp & Spider, Farfisa Organ, Moog Modular V, Oberheim OB-SX, Roland TR-808, Linndrum LM-2, and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, he serves a deliciously widescreen sound, yet perhaps the most crucial element is Steve's own voice, albeit filtered and transformed by his kit to escape the strictures of gender and create cloud-like choral harmonies and pads which both emulate and trigger human responses equally. They're almost inseparable from the purely synthetic elements, yet it's their unique formants (sort of vocal fingerprints) which present a valuable variable and a warm, glowing soul which radiates optimism and a positive sense of futurism.(BOOMKAT)