Hauschka to return to Hollywood Forever's Masonic Lodge for prepared piano performance [Video]

One highlight of last year's concert season was a strange and beautiful piano performance by Dusseldorf, Germany-based Volker Bertelsmann, who performs under the guise Hauschka. The pianist works on prepared piano in much the same way that John Cage did seven decades earlier. By opening a grand piano and tweaking the strings with devices of his own making, Bertelsmann creates compositions featuring sounds that he designs himself, and the result is an epiphany.

But where Cage stuck mostly to nuts and bolts to change the tones on his piano, Bertelsmann goes further, employing, among other devices, gaffer tape, bottle tops, kitchen foil and felt wedges to conjure new sounds. The highlight of last year's performance was Hauschka's work with Ping Pong balls, which he places inside the piano. When they balls are settled, he begins playing, and the result looks like popcorn exploding: orbs jumping up from inside the piano while the melody seeps out.

Granted, all of this would be no more than sideshow antics if Hauschka didn't have the chops. But he's a remarkable pianist who uses his imagination not as a crutch to hide subpar skills, but as a springboard into a whole other world of music.

Hauschka returns to the Masonic Lodge -- one of the most beautiful music venues in the city -- on May 1 to perform both old and new work, especially highlighting tracks from his forthcoming release, "Salon des Amateurs." He will be joined by Samuli Kosminen from the stunning Icelandic band múm on drums.

-- Randall Roberts

 

Sean Lennon's Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger haunts Hollywood tonight [UPDATED]

It’s apropos that Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl would pick the Hollywood Forever Cemetery as the place to make the L.A. debut of their folk project Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger. The album in haunted by all sorts of things – Syd Barrett’s sun-scarred psych and pastoral English folk; a lyrical world of hope glimmering in corners of apocalypse; Lennon’s uncannily familiar vocal lilt and way with unexpected guitar runs.

The duo’s debut album “Acoustic Sessions” is out Oct. 26 on their own label, Chimera Music, and they play Hollywood Forever tonight. We talked via e-mail to both members about their folk lineage, if there’s any beauty in environmental decay and how close harmonies make people closer. (The opted to answer the questions collectively.)

This record draws from some really classic, vintage folk and psychedelia. How do you two feel it's a modern album as well?

Of course we're big fans of experimental 'folky' music from the '60s like Syd Barrett, Os Mutantes and White Noise, but we try our best to re-combine chords and words in ways that are, at least to our ears, a bit different. In a world where everything's been done under the sun, the best one can do is make a collage of things you like, and re-juxtapose them until they feel new. Our subject matter tends to be distinctly modern. We like to sing about synthetic DNA, while playing old accordions.