Ulrich Schnauss, Classic or Dud?

lol early 2007 me

not to get all LJ about the matter

There was a thread at the end of '03 where everyone was asked to recommend a single track to download from an album they felt deserved more attention. I picked "Blumenthal" from ASIP, and I still think it's my favorite song off any of his albums. Don't know if it's a bias I have for all things Cocteau (it can't be, I love shoegaze just as much), but that track is just perfect to me. The second and third chorus repeats still light me up after hundreds of listens.

Had 'In all the Wrong Places' on a loop for the last hour.

Am I
A) Depressed
B) On Crack
C) Pissed
D) Mentally ill
E) In love with the song

It's actually all eight!

When it pulses at around three minutes - search it you music loving freaks

Congratulations, "On My Own", you just became the first song in my iTunes collection to make it to 100 completed plays!!! :D

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^quite possibly, song of the fucking decade

Mark my words, A Strangely Isolated Place will be understood as the seminal work of absolute genius that it is perhaps 10-15 years from now.

― libcrypt, Saturday, 7 April 2007 18:30 (1 year ago)

this post basically justifies everything libcrypt has said or done on ILX

Imagine ASIP *with* Stars, Medusa and Goodbye on it

just imagine

oh shit

ok, have created a playlist

it is ASIP in its entirety with "Stars" inserted after "Letter From Home" and "Medusa" inserted after "Blumenthal"

"Goodbye" couldn't be included thanks to time constraints, and although I was tempted to sub it in for "Monday - Paracetamol", this would have damaged the album's flow, and created sequencing issues near the end, and besides it's not THAT brilliant, so it stayed off

it is a musical monolith

not that ASIP isn't anyway

hmm but I'm having second thoughts now. "Monday - Paracetamol" is the pretty, slightly Xanaxed de-stresser which soothes the listener's brain after the sheer emotional wrangle of "Letter From Home"...shoving a flat-out shoegaze pop song, even a totally brilliant one, in between kinda ruins the flow

am less concerned with "Medusa"'s position, but some things are probably best left as they were intended. as a last resort i'm pushing "Stars" up between "On My Own" and "Letter". but deep down, I know that ASIP's perfectly-sequenced entirety rules supreme

anyway I'm Bimbling, time for bed

You know, I've really gone off this guy, which is odd.

Kind of like eating too many lollies. Very awesome, but made me sick on the gorging too quick.

I think "Goodbye" is like the best song ever written ever whenever I listen to it.

It took me a long time to love Goodbye (the album) compared to his first two and bits of it still never get anything but skipped, especially the godawful Shine. The good tracks are up there with his very best though, esp. Goodbye, Never Be The Same and Medusa.

Any love here for the Guthrie remixes on the Quicksand Memory ep? I like the way that he tries to outgun Ulrich's wall of synths with his own wall of guitars and very nearly succeeds.

Assuming he's working on some new stuff it would be good to hear him step back a bit from the more-is-more approach of Goodbye and revisit the simplicity of ...Trains.

Used to like, but started hating once he became, well, OMNIPRESENT.

I think that the three most PH34RED words in the nu-gaze canon are:

ULRICH. SCHNAUSS. REMIX.

This should be my perfect music, synthesis of shoegaze textures and ambient Germanic electronica, but it just leaves me cold. He just seems to drain the life out of things. Too much midrange.

I'm not a stan of his remixes in general, and I can see where you are with the midrange crit, but his takes on Justin Robertson and I'm Not A Gun are both awesome.

My main worry with ol' Uli is that he's painted himself into a bit of a corner with this maximalism approach ("more tracks! all playing at once! sonic cathedrals!") and it's at odds with the unshowy melodicism of his earlier stuff.

I found him OK on record, but seeing him live twice kind of made me dislike him... not for the side-on staring at laptop with no audience engagement thing, but just because, y'know, does this guy have anything not found on the cutting room floor after BoC remixed Slag Boom van Loon?

(though first time live was as somewhat inappropriate support for Stars of the Lid in an aggravatingly crammed-with-chatterers Dublin pub where we got stuck right at the top of the stairs to the bar and were constantly elbowed, and second time was in the middle of an all-day nu-gaze snoozefest where every band looked awesome on paper and yet managed to bore me to tears by the sheer sameyness, so, you know)

I tend to prefer him live - UNLESS that twat from Longview is singing in which case KILL KILL KILL.

Seems that Ulrich and his label(s) are now suing Guns n' Roses over samples lifted on for the intro of Riad N' The Bedouins:

Rolling Stone's report

The article seems fundamentally wrongheaded to me; if you listen to the tracks in question and then the GnR song it's 100% obvious that they've used samples of them. The samples aren't in anything but the intro (and certainly doesn't form the body of the song), but if they've not cleared this then surely it's illegal? And bloody stupid too, given how apparent it is.

Agreed! It's not like Chinese Democracy was a haste job either :)

Rolling Stone's reporter having cloth ears shock.

I don't know guys, the first thing I thought when I heard Chinese Democracy was "shit, Axl has been listening to loads of Ulrich Schnauss, hasn't he?".

I just found out about this. Way to keep it a secret, guys!

http://blog.pedigreecuts.com/?p=294

We are proud to announce that this magnificent album, the fruit of a collaboration between Ulrich Schnauss and Jonas Munk is now available to our agents via Harvest Media. This stunning 14 track foray into the world of the emotive and uplifting has already started gathering interest and reactions worldwide. A big thanks to Ulrich & Jonas for their efforts and to everyone else involved in this project.

PED A010 – Ulrich Schnauss & Jonas Munk – “Epic” is available now.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ulrich and Manual? Damn. Has anyone heard it?

Wow, "Chasing Rainbows" streaming on that link above is *immense*. Never heard of this before, and by the look of it they are not even definitely releasing it for sale = insane.

http://astrangelyisolatedplace.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/ulrich-schnauss-jonas-munk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk552H2SUKY

Wow, Chasing Rainbows doesn't actually suck! I know that's damning with faint praise, I'm surprised to find I like it. I just wish they'd turn that endless Ulrich-verb down a bit.

Actually just discovered that if you scroll through the album covers up in the header like you would in iTunes, and get to the Schnauss & Munk album, you can stream the entire thing.

http://blog.pedigreecuts.com/?cat=16

Hint: go to your left.

mmm

v good job JF. This will be the soundtrack to this morning!

http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/2010/08/engineers-return-in-praise-of-more/

:D

hubba hubba.

did I hear SHOEGAZE SUPERGROUP

this is bigger than Kevin Shields, bigger than religion

Wow. I never did get around to that second Engineers album since I never saw it any shops. Worth looking into?

yes, it's better than the first one

It's as good as the first one was bad. (This doesn't include the first ep, which was quite good in its own right.)

it contains this for a start

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esuEMkGiU8s

Okay, you've convinced me to track it down.

dear school of seven bells street team, your record's good but if I were you I'd be QUAKING IN YOUR BOOTS come the 2010 Shoegaze Album Of The Year award ceremony

"sirocco" off this new schnauss/munk album is....... really good

Yeah, that album has surprised me by how good it is - on first listen it seemed a bit low-key, but Munk seems to have tamed the needles-in-the-red tendencies of Uli's last album and I've enjoyed it more with every play. My favourite Schnauss has always been Trains... and this feels like he's rediscovered some of the unfussy melodicism that he used so well there.

better than school of seven bells? that is setting the bar pretty low.

I think it might be safe to post on this thread now LJ has gone?

Anyway, a YEAR later, I am finally getting around to listening to the Ulrich Schnauss & Jonas Munk album. (I was actually looking for the Robin Guthrie remix of On My Own and this popped up in Spotify, don't ask why.)

Shock, horror, I actually quite like it. I'm not sure if this is because of the beautiful sweeping guitar soundscapes - or because I'm feeling a lot more tolerant towards Schnaussy now I'm not tripping over him every damn week at Sonic Cathedral. (also, finally, he has dumped that pompous twat from Longview and got in a decent collaborator, which definitely helps.)

I just checked out that Robin Guthrie remix...he still has the goods!!

New Schnauss collaboration with Mark Peters from Engineers sounds like it will be fantastic. The couple of songs Ive heard really break away from his syrupy shoegaze and are closer to JMJarre/Krafwerk in ambience.

BUT IT ISNT AVAILABLE ANYWHERE DIGITALLY. Only on CD/vinyl. I wanna listen to it now and I dont want to pyrat it :(

But meantime, some tracks from it are on YT:

Gift Horse's Mouth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuEVOJIhM98

Rosen im Ashphalt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENbbqMl9J4M&feature=related

Pitchfork razzed the new album, but I think the basis of the criticism is nonsense, so I'm disregarding it. Of course I'm a big fan of Enya, too. Anyone heard it yet?

i like the last one w/mark peters a lot, though jessica harvell didn't

I truly cannot make sense of the "begs for a riskier approach" thing that the Pitchfork reviewers are fixated on. I haven't heard the Mark Peters collaboration, but Goodbye and the "album" with Jonas Munk were each an improvement over his previous releases.

Coming to the new one as a long-time fan, I'd say there's lots to recommend it - def. better than Goodbye and it *does* feel like he's trying to do something a bit different, he's certainly got some new gear since his last solo release. Heavy rotation on the title track, the splendidly mid-tempo "Like a Ghost in Your Life" (the snaking melody line on this is vintage Ulrich) and all last week I was hammering "I Take Comfort in Your Ignorance" - the latter has an ace remix by Tycho just out too.

so i'm see Ulrich Schnauss Sunday Night at the world famous Troubadour in West Hollywood. wow, last time i went there i saw Sonic Boom's E.A.R. and meet Timothy Leary (true story) so it has been a few years. so what can i expect is he any good live, has anyone seen him recently?