“Ten sex vibrators,” he tells Beat. “I found them in a slot machine in a men’s in New York City.” He says their silent motors make vibrators very useful for his purposes. “I also use metal cleaning pads, they are awesome; they created a big droning sound, a beautiful droning layer. I use ping pong balls – you don’t expect to see ping pong balls on a piano.” Hauschka notes that customs officers often ask him a few questions when he travels. “My bag is full of bizarre material not connected with piano,” he says. “They don’t believe you when you say it is to make music.” Hauschka is now considered the world’s foremost practitioner of this irreverent way of using what is usually perceived as a rather serious instrument. On his first tour to Australia Melbourne will get to hear his unique sounds at a concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre. He will be in Australia to promote his most recent album called Abandoned City, inspired by some real lonely and unloved towns.
Looking back Hauschka says he sees how he was shaped by growing up in a small village. “I was born in a village called Ferndorf which means ‘distant village’. I wasn’t aware of the poetic name then but growing up there gave me so much strength; it influences everything I am doing, you don’t see it when you’re 20 but I look back and see how the forests, the freedom, gave me so much inspiration.” HAUSCHKA’s music sounds very organic, with rhythmic instinctive sound reminiscent of the sorts of things you hear outdoors. “Absolutely I am inspired by sounds in nature,” he says. “Growing up in the countryside, I remember as a kid lying in a field and thinking that the sounds I heard were so loud. I am a big fan of boosting small sounds to the front where people don’t normally expect to hear them.”
Hauschka was originally looking for a way to make the piano sound more electronic without actually using a computer as the sound source when he discovered prepared piano decades ago. He reckons he is always experimenting. “My music is in constant development. It’s finding a way of creating something that is uniquely your own.” He first started experimenting this way in a friend’s studio in Wales, trying to create a drum sound when he had the idea of inserting cellophane bags between the hammers and strings of the piano. “I’m not relying on anything that has its own tuning. You have to use light materials.” John Cage, who famously said ‘all sound is music’, was an early proponent of prepared piano. “I agree with him,” he notes. Creatively he’s stretched out in many directions, having worked on numerous soundtracks for film, theatre, dance, and film. “I have too many irons in the fire. I love many, many sorts of music, all sorts of styles.” Imposing the physical limits of prepared piano on what he can do creates focus, he says, and the sculptural ‘hands-on’ aspect of working this way especially appeals to him.
Trained in classical music, as a youth Hauschka was much more interested in rock music and formed a school band at the age of 14. “It was the only thing you could do; you got bored to death so you started making music as way of entertaining yourself. Rock music was more interesting to girls.” Inspired by the ‘next generation’ of electronic music following the massively influential Kraftwerk, German bands Oval and Mouse on Mars, for example, he eventually chose music over medicine and moved into electronica/hip hop music with his own band God’s Favourite Dog. Increasingly he found himself wanting to make music without form or vocals. He says he looks back on his musical tastes and his own work and with a fair bit of discerning criticism. “I think ‘did I really like that?” But the work hasn’t changed; you have changed. I am a big fan of changing habits, of changing the way I make music, changing the streets where I walk to have a coffee; in my music and my life I am trying to escape my habits.” Besides producing his solo albums the last decade has seen him collaborate with artists such as Samuli Kosminen (from Iceland’s Múm), Calexico’s Joey Burns and John Convertino.
How does he know when a piece is finished? “Intuitively; it’s a feeling. With most of my work there are different levels of finished. You start something and ‘put it on hold’ by leaving it, let it rest, then getting back to it and you can make a much clearer decision with a different view. I often surprise myself.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
