Never Be The Same / Shine / Stars / Einfeld / In Between The Years / Here Today, Gone Tomorrow / A Song About Hope / Medusa / Goodbye / For Good 

INDEPENDIENTE

Concocting gorgeous walls of sound that take you back to the shoegazing glory days of My Bloody Valentine, The Cocteau Twins and Slowdive, Berliner Ulrich Schnauss is a musician reaching for similar celestial highs.

The release of his third album GOODBYE follows 2003's critically well received A STRANGELY ISOLATED PLACE, and like it's forerunner, Schnauss goes about meticulously building layer upon layer of shimmering audio silk, reaching some truly spectacular and glimmering highs.  Perhaps a little too in awe of his all too obvious reference points for the most part to utterly convince, Ulrich Schnauss is nevertheless an artist whose hero worship is mesmerising and sublime all the same.  Moments such as the shimmering album opener NEVER BE THE SAME swiftly set the tone, layer upon layer of delicate synth washes gently waft over you in a gorgeous heat haze, the sound of Slowdive resurrected and produced by My Bloody Valentine.  SHINE introduces softly sung melodies to the mix, a whispered voice crooning in hushed reverence against the glistening sound waves.  With STARS, Schnauss delivers a more techno oriented groove to his sound, breathy female vocals buried deep in the mix, delicately brushing up against train track beats.

IN BETWEEN THE YEARS develops in a more avant garde Harold Budd type way, swooning synth work maintaining a subtler, fragile direction.  The eighties influenced HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW feels like the background to a lavish Miami Vice episode whilst on A SONG ABOUT HOPE, Schnauss moves into lush ambient territory, all sweltering atmospherics and hushed majesty.

MEDUSA feels like the first instance of Ulrich Schnauss moving away from blind hero worship and developing his sound into something a touch more unique, sure those My Bloody Valentine influences prevail, but the dissonant electronica and surreal quirks point towards something much more intriguing.

Although, a record of swooning gorgeousness and luscious highs, GOODBYE is an album that at times feels a little too in thrall of its obvious influences, more an exercise in retreading previous shoegazing highs than a work that attempts to say anything fresh.  But whilst playing out like a tribute to these highs, you can't deny the impressive nature of Schnauss' vision and fans of the whole shoegazing scene will find plenty to swoon over here.

BIOGRAPHY

How to describe Ulrich Schnauss music? Let's see. It's shoegazing heroes. Slowdive headlining a rave. It's krautrock plunging headlong into the celestial raptures of the Cocteau Twins. It's U2 if Brian Eno had ousted Bono and commandeered the band in 1985. It's Balearic with a view of the Baltic instead of the Mediterranean. It's art-techno for the heart as well as the head. It's stadium chillout, as immense as a festival field and as intimate as a bedroom. It's celebration and catharsis. It's vapour trails and meteor showers. And it's very, very good.

So far, the quietly spoken German who creates this music has operated beneath the radar. His first two albums, 2001's Far Away Trains Passing By and 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place, worked their way into record collections by stealth. People heard tracks played by Rob Da Bank or Tom Middleton, or chanced upon him on stage at the Big Chill or Bestival, or heard about him from friends. However they discovered him, they were hooked. It also led to Ulrich remixing some of his shoegazing heroes (Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, and Mark Gardener of Ride), as well as Depeche Mode, Justin Robertson, Lunz (Hans-Joachim Roedelius), and Longview.

Ulrich's third album, Goodbye, is his first for Independiente. It is also the end of a chapter in his sound. "I see these three albums as moving closer to something I wanted to do right from the beginning but didn't quite manage," he says. "Merging songwriting and indie elements with electronic music. I've tried to take all the ideas to the maximum."

The Quicksand Memory EP is the perfect introduction to Ulrich's sonic wonderland, bridging the gap between A Strangely Isolated Place and his new album. The EP opener, the lush, epic 'Look At The Sky', is followed by 'Medusa' from Goodbye - an example of Ulrich Schnauss at his heaviest. The final two tracks are 'Gone Forever' and 'On My Own', taken from A Strangely Isolated Place, but showcased here in newly remixed forms courtesy of Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie.

Like its predecessors, Goodbye constructs its own world, vast and vivid. When he's making music, Ulrich sees colours: one song might be red, another blue. Next time, he wants to "record an album based on more traditional electronic music structures - which could enable me to merge all these different influences beyond recognition". Meanwhile, this is the album he's been moving towards for over a decade: a sonic tour de force, an alternative reality, a life-changer.

Ulrich Schnauss was born in northern Germany fishing port Kiel in 1977, during his formative years he grew a love for a broad spectrum of music ranging from my bloody valentine to tangerine dream, chapterhouse to early bleep & breakbeat tracks. There was not much opportunity to see some of his musical heroes in Kiel, so the inevitable pull of the big city meant a move to Berlin in 1996.

By which time Ulrich’s musical output had already become prolific with a variety of pseudonyms (most notably View to the Future and Ethereal 77) veering from ambient to drum and bass via electronica. These earlier works were soon, catching the eye of Berlin electronica label CCO who took up the story.

“It came a bit of a regular thing, those anonymous packages sent to us from Berlin with a single CDR, a biro scrawl revealing at closer inspection the simple stamp 'Ethereal 77'. Ulrich had been making music for years, producing, touring, piecing together that BIG sound. And yet each of these CDR instalments revealed something a little more personal.”

Soon these submissions to CCO developed into Ulrich’s first album under his own name entitled ‘Far away Trains Passing By’ which as it slowly seeped into people’s consciousness became an electronic classic. Listeners were taken with the lush instrumentation and the emotion of the elegant, simple and beautiful music.

Yet nothing was to prepare his growing army of supporters for this next record ‘A Strangely Isolated Place’ which slowly came together during 2001 into a record that really showed some of Ulrich’s youthful indie influences. His debut album under his real name established his pedigree as an outstanding electronic composer, but somehow he managed to take it further by developing his interest in songwriting for electronic music, born of his love for such giants of the independent world as My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. From this humble conception, comes forth a record of surprisingly rare emotional power.

‘A Strangely Isolated Place’ has become one of those extraordinary and rare occurrences; a genuinely word-of-mouth record slowly growing in stature by virtue of its over-riding ability to deliver more than the usual arid and academic treatises on the state of the synthesizer, or solipsistic bedsit meanderings.

“When you’ve worked with computers and keyboards for a number of years, they become not so fascinating of themselves anymore. I gained in confidence after people began to discover ‘Faraway Trains…’ and it hasn’t really stopped since then. This time I decided not to compromise on what I wanted to do, with what I thought people might want me to do.”

The results are an oddly retro-futurist record, which owes more to MBV’s ‘Loveless’ or Vangelis’s ‘Bladerunner’ soundtrack than Ulrich’s computer peers. It sounds all the better for it.

Since the release of both albums Ulrich has been asked to work with and remix a host of artists including: Mojave 3, Longview, Johannes Schmoelling, The Zephyrs, Lunz (Rodelius) etc.

He is currently writing and recording his third album.

LINE UP

Ulrich Schnauss

Judith Beck

DISCOGRAPHY

QUICKSAND MEMORY EP (Independiente>2007)

Look At The Sky (Rob McVey Version) 

Medusa (Edit)

Gone Forever (Robin Guthrie Version) 

On My Own (Robin Guthrie Version)

GOODBYE (Independiente>2007)

Never Be The Same

Shine

Stars

Einfeld

In Between The Years

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

A Song About Hope

Medusa

Goodbye

For Good

LINKS

Ulrich Schnauss>www.ulrich-schnauss.com

FURTHER LISTENING

My Bloody Valentine

Slowdive

Chapterhous