Ulrich Schnauss – Live @ Oslo
aaamusic | On 05, Mar 2015
Friday 27th February, London
This Ulrich Schnauss show at the intimate Oslo in Hackney was wicked, heady and thought-provoking. The one time Longview keyboardist is best known as an indietronica producer-musician, but tonight he avoided any vocal-laced shoegaze, and kept his head buried in his electronic equipment with his eyes firmly fixed on his laptop.
The German musician, producer and songwriter hasn’t had the easiest of transitions from more instrument-orientated, indie-leaning music to electronic music, like, say, Caribou had, with some dance music critics accusing Ulrich Schnauss of lacking substance. Substance, however, doesn’t necessitate melodic hooks, vocal samples and the dropping of climatic beats – in fact, Schnauss’ move into electronica was to free himself from the traditional verse-chorus-verse shackles of his prior shoegazing electronica sound. No dance critic took any qualm(s) with jumping on the Jon Hopkins Immunity bandwagon, and there is definitely comparisons to be drawn between the two producers more recent work: both Hopkins and Schnauss are intentionally anticlimactic.
Personally, I found Schnauss’ A Long Way To Fall (2013) record incredibly substantial, in that it was a collection of carefully constrained, quietly pulsating electronic dreamscapes, and certainly not a series of unfinished ideas. The atmospheres created were somewhere in between the ambient techno of Jon Hopkins and the melancholic neo-classical of Ólafur Arnalds.
Tonight, however, in this live environment, Ulrich Schnauss doesn’t just want to lull his audience into a peaceful, hypnotic state. After an initial segment of near beat-less, euphoric ambience, he begins to introduce various club elements. It’s Friday night after all. The soaring synths are joined first by minimal techno beats and then – after Schnauss speaks of his recently departed hero and friend, the Tangerine Dream found Edgar Froese, who he dedicates the second half of the set to – slowed, lightly industrial bass music, which gives way to 90s rave sounds. The inevitable encore even features robotic drum’n’bass; oldschool Ulrich Schnauss. The intended atmospheres were not always accomplished, with certain elements and movements not quite hitting their targets, and there was the odd synth line that sounded a bit, well, naff, but for the most part, this set was thrilling.
Oslo was a great shout for this gig, allowing a suitably heated intimacy that matched the claustrophobic intensity of the music. Apart from the first couple of tunes – where the bass was too high in the mix, drowning out the synths and other subtleties – the sound was spot on. For this evening’s performance, Schnauss was joined onstage by Nat Urazmetova, who provided the AV show. The results were mainly decent, but, like the music, ever so slightly inconsistent. For every sequence of stimulating, leftfield images we got a cheesy city skyline or mountain shot, just like for every extended segment of challenging avant-garde music we got a shamelessly accessible melody or tasteless synth line. But these were just minor issues in an otherwise perfectly pitched performance.
Soundcrash have announced another Ulrich Schnauss show at the Village Underground on 29th October (click here for tickets). With this Oslo show selling out so quickly, it would be sensible to snap up your tickets sharpish.
