Ulrich Schnauss
Electronica / DJ
Ulrich Schnauss was born in northern Germany fishing port Kiel in 1977. He became interested in a range of music: My Bloody Valentine Tangerine Dream, Chapterhouse, and 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.
Ulrich's musical output began under the pseudonyms of View to the Future and Ethereal 77. These electronica and drum-driven pieces became noticed by Berlin electronica label CCO (City Centre Offices): "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."
Ulrich developed these submissions to CCO into his first album under his own name, the quietly haunting Far Away Trains Passing By, released in Europe in 2001, and in the United States in 2005.
His next album, 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place, showed the influence of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie:
"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 Far Away Trains Passing By, 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 retro-futurist "A Strangely Isolated Place" may be said to owe more to MBV's Loveless or Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack than Ulrich's computer peers.
Since the release of both albums Ulrich has been asked to work with and remix with artists including: Mojave 3, Long-view, Johannes Schmoelling, The Zephyrs, Lunz (Rodelius) etc.
|