The music of Cleveland trio Emeralds is pretty wide, both in the range of sounds and instruments they use, and the expansive feel of their New Age-tinted creations. For his first proper solo release (after a handful of low-run cassettes and CD-Rs), Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt took a step in the opposite direction. As he told the website Stool Pigeon, Tragedy & Geometry "came from just wanting to spend time with one instrument and really exploring all the possibilities of sound you can get from that."
The instrument in question is synthesizer, and the music Hauschildt makes with it is like Emeralds in miniature. He focuses on small, basic patterns that produce two kinds of songs-- slow, drifting drones and pulsing, minimalist loops. The effect can be as big and spacious as anything his group does, but Hauschildt always starts from a base of simplicity. Each track is an exercise in turning tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something large.
The lack of obvious variety could make Tragedy & Geometry sound generic, but Hauschildt's devout tack actually gives the album a distinct personality. Choose any single track, and reference points quickly come to mind-- Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, and various half-remembered foreign film scores and PBS-doc soundtracks. But listen in sequence, and Hauschildt's consistent way with this kind of sound becomes clear, in a starry-eyed mix of small swells and planetarium-friendly wonder. At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed. In Hauschildt's songs, emotion feels closer to a happy accident than an overarching intention.
This comes across strongest in Tragedy & Geometry's best cut, "Music for a Moiré Pattern". At 11 minutes, it's by far the album's longest piece, but it's no grand epic. Though its sparkly loops crest into some moving crescendos, its core is simple repetition and the fascinating patterns it creates. Throughout, Hauschildt deftly treads the fine line between guiding his instrument and letting its cyclical mechanisms do the work. You get the sense that he's basically happy to get out of his own way-- a common goal with anything this mantra-like-- and is as awed by the hypnotic aspects of overlapping synths as the emotional ones. Maybe that's the key to Tragedy & Geometry's sneaky power-- by letting his synths tell tales instead of forcing them to, Hauschildt finds stories bigger than his own.
