Booking Info

Territory: Europe
Agent: Mark
Links: official site / Fat Cat

Biography

Hauschka is the captivating Düsseldorf-based pianist Volker Bertelmann. His music can be microscopic in detail and quietly entrancing, or widescreen and cinematic in scope and feel. A suite of songs can take you on a journey into the world of the piano and all it can conjure for the listener. Hauschka performs beautiful post-classical chamber works drawing on minimalism and laced with the spirit of Fluxus, bringing to mind the expansive open-endedness of The Necks, Nico Muhly’s post-minimalist compositions or Eric Satie’s sense of mischief. Lately he has also taken inspiration from the German techno continuum on latest album Salon des Amateurs, adding live percussion, electronic sweeps and bass frequencies to his trademark piano preparations.

Channelling the spirit of John Cage’s prepared piano, Hauschka opens up his instrument and playfully performs public operations on its innards using guitar strings, gaffer tape and other bits of junk in search of new colours and textures. The melodic and harmonic properties of the piano, so often dominant in piano music, are set against the homespun clicks, scrapes and rattles of the internal mechanisms when certain keys are played. Harnessing the percussive potential of the instrument and wrapping this around his keen melodic ear makes Hauschka an auteur of the ebonies, as well as an alchemist of the wood, string and metal.

With 3 albums and 2 EPs on Fat Cat, he has developed a reputation as an entrancing live performer, playing at concert halls and festivals across the world and picking up fans in the such as Tortoise, The Necks and Michael Nyman. A prodigious collaborator, he regularly performs in a duo with Mum’s Samuli Kosminen, and is developing a new collaboration with classical violinist Hilary Hahn. Kept Impulses was a specially commissioned collaboration with James Blackshaw and Nancy Elizabeth, which premiered at London’s Barbican Hall. This alongside film soundtracks (Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr), multi-media collaborations (Jeff Desom’s Ghost Piano), and arrangement duties (Frightened Rabbit) and you get a sense of his restless creative impulses.

Press Quotes

“Satie feather-drops, gorgeous string plucks, transfixing rattles. Stillness is the move.” – Rolling Stone

“The sounds that Volker Bertelmann creates with(in) a piano are nothing short of astonishing… a triumph” – Mojo ****

“A rapturous exercise in acoustic ‘electronica’” – Uncut ****

“ingenious and exquisite” – New York Times

Tour Dates

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