As Hauschka, Volker Bertelmann writes fairly plain piano music that winds up sounding bewilderingly elaborate. What he plays matters less than what he does before playing it: shoving bits of junk (wood, foil, paper) in the harp or tacks in the hammers. He feeds this snaggletooth grin a diet of frantic minimalist ostinatos and sweetly lingering right-hand themes. Its digestion produces outlandish sounds, not just percussive but also melodic, thanks to live electronic effects. Even when he's playing alone, as he is on Abandoned City, we seem to hear everything from kick drums and rattles to synth arpeggios and violas. You'd swear there was a plucked lute on "Sanzhi Pod City", a runny music box on "Pripyat". I still can't quite believe there aren't strings on "Who Lived Here?".
Bertelmann says he was unaware of John Cage when he had the idea, though someone must have clued him in after his first album, as his second was dutifully titled The Prepared Piano. Coming from a techno background, he basically wanted to make an acoustic synthesizer where each key could be programmed, after a fashion, with its own timbre. Quite different from the austerity of Cage, his songs have a clumsy grace, eagerly tripping over themselves as they rush between frolicsome and ominous moods. The latter gain ground on Abandoned City, as though Bertelmann were glimpsing a desolate future in the discarded places for which the songs are named.
After learning his way around solo prepared piano improvisations, Bertelmann started branching out. Enlisting collaborators and adding electronics, he enshrined his knack for pert chamber froth on Ferndorf, perfected his acoustic house music concept on Salon des Amateurs, and tried out bracing modern chamber music with a world-renowned young classical violinist on Silfra. Abandoned City brings him full circle to solo piano, but with bits and pieces he's picked up along the way. It's often patterned like electronic dance music, its busy syncopation redoubled by a small fleet of clean and filtered microphones.
Within its limits, the album is fairly diverse, though after so many records, the style might be wearing a bit thin. There's horror-movie buildup music like "Elizabeth Bay", acoustic IDM like "Pripyat", slowly sweeping melancholia like "Craco", techno in homespun disguise like the exhilarating "Agdam". But no matter what Bertelmann puts in his piano, every clever noise it makes necessarily deprives it of another, expanding timbral range at the expense of harmonic. All the skittering pizzicato, clenched syncopation and scudding bass overshadows distinctions in the compositions. When the convulsions relax on "Who Lived Here?", where Bertelmann lets a beautiful melodic structure unfold, it's a nice change of pace to hear more of his voice than his piano's.
