“A commonly respected feature of an ambient record is that you can forget about it and just let it color your life. Nonlin is not that. It’s asking you to notice the cracks in the structure and the tension caused by them. It wants to show all its parts, not hide them. It’s a more challenging record, for that reason, but it’s also one of the more rewarding listens of Hauschildt’s career” – POP MATTERS

“the compositions on Nonlin provide depth and passion enough to show the listener more of the journey each time. They create a unique world through which Hauschildt guides the listener with a sense of gentleness and wonder, like a helping hand showing the way in the darkness” – EXCLAIM

Electronic musician Steve Hauschildt (currently based in Tbilisi) has composed minimal sounds at extraordinary levels for over a decade. First within his former band, Emeralds, an American touchstone of 2000s home-recorded psychedelic noise music, and later across a steady and critically-acclaimed stream of solo releases. As a live performer, he explores the intersection of experimental music and video art, having toured heavily across North America, Europe, and Asia. As a recording artist, Hauschildt utilizes synthesizers, computers, and digital processing to continuously transmute and evolve modes of electronic music.

In 2011, he released his debut full-length with Kranky Records, Tragedy & Geometry, a post-kosmische album inspired by Greek muses and the disposability of technology. His next LP in 2012, Sequitur, was recorded in Vancouver and featured nearly 20 different synthesizers spanning the last five decades. In 2013, Editions Mego released S/H, an extensive anthology of rare and unreleased works from Hauschildt’s archives (2005-2012). Additionally, he co-curated a compilation for the Air Texture series in 2014.

In 2015, Hauschildt completed the cascading full-length Where All Is Fled. Both its artwork and its music found inspiration from surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions. The following year’s Strands, his fourth release with Kranky, presented what Hauschildt called “a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths.” He approached compositions like malleable fibers of a unified whole, like strands of rope. Reflecting on his hometown of Cleveland, Hauschildt focused the gritty, decaying compositions upon “the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry.”

With Dissolvi, his first release on Ghostly International (August 2018) and his most collaborative work to date — featuring Julianna Barwick, GABI, and a broader set of instrumentation overall — Hauschildt extends a vast, vibrating framework in which to consider the state of being. Songs are cerebral in orientation, but beyond explanation — references to solipsistic desires, modern-day surveillance, and physiological phenomena abound — the music is truly visceral and profoundly rich.

Just a year later, Hauschildt returns with Nonlin, an album that’s freer, leaner, and looser, both structurally and conceptually; less linear compared to its predecessor, but still captivating. Developed and recorded in several studios during and around the edges of tour — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Tbilisi, and Brussels — this material emulates an alienating encounter with a smattering of places, a replicant of culture shock, a solitary and stark experience with uncanny environments, melody and dissonance as oblique locales.

Nonlin finds Hauschildt evolving his palette of tools, integrating modular and granular synthesis. The improvisatory and generative nature of modular systems, when paired with his signature grid-oriented and hand-played techniques, guides these compositions slightly out of line to hypnotic effect. Opener “Cloudloss” permeates the mix with an unsettling smog, which reappears and all but engulfs “A Planet Left Behind.” On cuts like “Attractor B” and “Subtractive Skies,” pockets of air rest between sequenced pulses, whose crumpling and flattening folds build into a restrained rapture of crisp frequencies and milky reverb-swallowed coruscations.

The album’s title track and centerpiece logs on to a foreign network, a fractured percussion signal that modulates and stutters into static amidst curious melodic sparkling in the hazy bandwidth. “Reverse Culture Music” casts an elegant and brooding stream of strings, pizzicato and churning bow from Chicago cellist Lia Kohl, against chiming minimalist synth frameworks. A surprising pattern emerges in the taciturn systems at work. Hauschildt continues to expand his already horizon-wide repertoire, here exploring the effects of corrupting coordinates; a flight subject to the collapsable abilities of time in remote spaces, a smearing of the axis to elegiac ends.