In the start of my incline towards social ineptitude, I left San Diego and hit the I5 around noon. It was a blissful Saturday and I felt almost irate that I wasn’t flocking to the sand with 90% of Southern California that afternoon. But rather than add any more shades to my brown skin, beers to my belly, and superficiality to my mentality, I would find an alternative method to enjoy the cystal clear skies, beaming sunshine, and altogether flawless day. It would be because of a German musician named Ulrich Schnauss.
After possessing only three tracks, but loving their continual introspective exhilaration, I finally got the album (A Strangely Isolated Place) in it’s entirety from my homie Alex. I think the album title speaks for itself, for it is to be listened, disected, diagnosed, and digested by the solo being. And even better, by the “solo-wandering-traveler-being.”
The i5 is a freeway that runs from the US/Mexico border in San Diego, through California, Oregon, and Washington, and ends at the US/Canadian border. Many would attest this freeway as being incredibly boring with nothing but flat farmland for the eyes to gaze upon. I would normally agree with this observation, too.
But not on this auspiciously-felt day. With the windows down & wind blowing in my face, Ulrich “singing”, golden hills radiating in the distance, light blue stretched across into the horizon, and an abundance of thoughts to sift through - What was the cause of unhappiness during this trip to SoCal? Why was I having so much trouble interacting? What were my next steps going to be in my future? As the hours rolled by, I spotted the family of windmills that inhabit the fields near the 580 interchange. They are truly a magnificent site because of their aesthetic quality and because they mean that less than an hour remains in before I pull up home to my driveway in Walnut Creek.
I just came across this music map - People who listen to Ulrich Schnauss also listen to blank.
Ryan Potts of Pop Matter’s writes:
The eight tracks present on Isolated are each swathed in elated soundscapes that are also grounded with a dynamic use of rhythm and percussion, as well as an ardent sense of melodic finesse.
Chris Shaffer of RainyDawg writes:
When people wake up in the morning, especially after long periods of confusion, dysphoria, and general melancholy, they typically need something to get them back in line. Something to show them that it’s okay, and that people out there still give a shit.
It seems like people need to compare an emerging artist with another one. Possibly it’s an older, influential band or an artist of the same genre with a copycat style. I guess we do it with everything - food, film, friends, places. I dislike it in a way, but it helps to create an idea about something unknown, in relativity, to something/someone already established in our mind. We have to relate this to a past experience. I have read a dozen reviews of Decemberists being compared with Neutral Milk Hotel. I think it’s a fair comparison to say, but they’re really so different.
Critics like comparing Ulrich to Brian Eno, Boards of Canada, My Bloody Valentine. But even the man himself admits to the latter in an interview with the Montreal Mirror:
“I think [My Bloody Valentine guitarist/producer] Kevin Shields is basically the last person in popular music history so far to have really changed the sound of music. I mean, every music genre in the last 10 years, if you look very closely, has something in it that you could trace back to My Bloody Valentine. I don’t think there’s any other musician on the planet of whom that can be said.”
My homie Gabe told me recently that he isn’t into too much new stuff. He’s gone back to the likes of Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and My Bloody Valentine - bands that brand what he likes to refer to as the “lo-fi aesthetic.” I’m working on trying to capture the beauty of these bands.
Aaron Rietz, of Prefix magazine writes:
Schnauss’s best moments brandish an epiphanous flair, a feeling akin to Platonic revelation, escaping the limiting and familiar confines of the cave.
I think it’s the anecdote to a feeling of disgruntled disenchantment, causing an intertwining of melancholy gaze and perennial happiness.
So get in your car, drive off into the day or night, and into a stangely isolated place.
I’m driving to LA tomorrow morning. Hopefully this will finish downloading by then.
Ulrich Schnauss, a 28 year-old with a last name of the modest tonality. Sometimes I am still happy to be German. I was introduced his music by a beautiful Jewish woman who did not want to date me because she could not tell her grandmother that she’d date a German.
I just got the other CD - far away trains passing by. Beautiful music.
ANyone knows the lyrics to “GOne Forever”?
Please????