INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC TO WORK TO: Chill, Ambient, Electronic Instrumental Mix - part 4

IDM/Downtempo

Cyberpunk / Future - Part 1

Classical remixed - part 14

Sinewave

Legoloop

Intense Revulsion

Suddenly The Trees Are Giving Way

Taken from the alum 'Goodbye'.

How to describe Ulrich Schnauss's 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. XFM's Lauren Laverne called A Strangely Isolated Place "a life changer everyone I have forced to buy it loves it."
 
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."
 
So the ambient tracks are more spacious, the songs more memorable, the multi-layered, guitar-heavy tracks more ragingly psychedelic. Just listen to the obliterating rush of Medusa, or the cloudbusting dream-pop of Stars (performed by long-time collaborator Judith Beck). At times, there are over 100 different audio tracks playing simultaneously: a tower of song. No wonder Goodbye has taken three solid years of in the studio.
 
If Ulrich hailed from somewhere less boring, things might have been different. Fortunately, he was born in 1977 in Kiel, an unprepossessing city on Germany's Baltic coast best known for its naval base. It seemed to the young Ulrich as if everything important was happening elsewhere.
 
He explains, "I was talking to Andrew Sherriff from Chapterhouse and he told me that being from Reading had a significant influence because the place was so shit that you had to create beautiful music to get out of that state of mind. I'd say the same thing for me. Kiel is probably the most boring, ugly place in the world. The whole city is grey concrete. Places like that inspire you to create something that elevates you out of reality for a few minutes."
 

Bands didn't tend to play in Kiel, but at least the NME arrived regularly at the train station, albeit four weeks late, and the british forces radio station was good. Around 1990, Ulrich discovered electronic music and shoegazing simultaneously: the Orb alongside My Bloody Valentine, 808 State next to Ride, Shades Of Rhythm beside Slowdive. He also followed up every artist namechecked by LFO in their 1991 single What Is House?: Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, YMO His core ideas about music were forged there and then.
 
"For me that was the magic of those days," he says. "You couldn't say if a band was electronic or rock. I'm not interested in purist ideas. I like it when things you don't expect merge and mix and something new comes out of it."
 
And because he never got to see his heroes in the flesh, they maintained an aura of mystery and wonder. "You make up your own idea of how things are. For me that whole early '90s scene was something I imagined, like a fairy tale - an alternative reality to what I was experiencing."
 
Ulrich worked as a psychiatric nurse as part of his national service. After that, he moved to Berlin, where he tried in vain to become accepted by the electronic scene. "I felt really isolated. I desperately tried to integrate but it just didn't work. I was trying to marry what I wanted to do with what was trendy at the time and I always ended up with a foul compromise. So I thought I might as well do what I want to do."
 
After a few years of watered down, pseudonymous productions which he'd rather you didn't seek out, Ulrich released Far Away Trains Passing By on the dauntingly hip City Centre Offices label. He was amazed they even wanted to release it; more amazed still when it became a cult success. With its abundant charm and unabashed optimism, it was the most pleasantly surprising electronic debut since Boards of Canada's Music Has The Right To Children.
Its more rock-influenced successor, A Strangely Isolated Place, received an even warmer response, from critics and other musicians alike. It 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.
 
Tired of the Berlin scene, Ulrich moved back to Kiel to make Goodbye. Most of his schoolfriends had moved away, so he didn't have to worry about distractions. His last two album titles spoke of isolation, but was that the pain of enforced loneliness or the comfort of voluntary solitude? Goodbye is equally ambivalent. "Emotionally, I find farewell situations interesting," he says. "Saying goodbye can be tragic or hopeful."
 
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 - Stars

Heroin and Your Veins - Absurd

Ulrich Schnauss - Monday Paracetamol (paphland remix)

Hol Baumann - Hours

From their LP "Carved By Glaciers" (2005)
You can buy it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/carved-by-glaciers/id294751657

Lymbyc Systym - Lotan Baba

Aes Dana - Antimatter (Post)

The Getaway Feat. Los Cauz, LP

From the album "We Are One".
Written and produced by Brian Saitzyk.
Additional percussion by Alex Spurkel.

Solar

Recurring - The Live Sessions EP

Recurring

TRON: Legacy

The Son of Flynn (From "TRON: Legacy"/Score)

Other channels you might like...
▶ @Hegemon
▶ @Your_Secret
▶ @Hip-Hop

Free Download: http://dl.aia.ag/cosmic-quest-blue-embers
Spotify: http://spotify.aia.ag/1Paybwf
iTunes: http://buy.aia.ag/1WzxKDp
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow @cosmicquest
http://facebook.com/cosmicquestmusic
http://twitter.com/thecosmicquest

♫ Listen on Spotify:
http://aia.ag/AIA-Spotify

♫ Support AIA:
http://aia.ag/AIA-SC
http://aia.ag/AIA-FB
http://aia.ag/AIA-YT
http://aia.ag/AIA-IG
http://aia.ag/AIA-TW
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submit music to the email found in the sidebar of the channel info!


Blue Embers

Free Download

Cosmic Quest - Blue Embers

Sinewave - Love It Up

Sinewave - Todd's Journey Into Temporal Space

Sinewave - Dodecahedron

Sinewave - Wizard Of Ahhhs

Sinewave - 3rd Density Blues

Hyphae

Blue Verve Vein (Mrs Jynx Remix)

Deeply disturbed

The Death Of A God

Uploaded due to FB requests. Ask and ye shall receive! This one is from my 2006 album entitled "Mellowdrama" Click the "Track Video" button above to view the video on YouTube.



Behold

Buy and Stream links https://fanlink.tv/oohuman

www.olivierorand.com

https://www.facebook.com/olivier.orand
https://www.instagram.com/olivier.orand
https://twitter.com/orandolivier

Mixed and Mastered at hyperelief.com

Human

Hours

.... selection of musics for Matsi's Art Gallery on Smallworlds.com 

Eastern Sun - gravity

From the EP "Adorn" | available as Flac, mp3 here: http://www.unseen.bigcartel.com/artist/mint-julep

Mint Julep is Keith and Hollie Kenniff

Mint Julep - Arristea

Heroin-And-Your-Veins-Alone(muzofon.com)

A soundtrack for a Blade Runner-type ripoff movie I imagined in my head.

If I had any skill I'd mix it into something continuous, but those talents evade me.  Any takers to string this all together?

Ulrich Schnauß - Monday-Paracetamol

RICH LINER - reach the sun, we are one

PERVERTED DREAMS (DEMO)

Live recording @ TheMahoganyRoom, CapeTown, one of the finest Jazz Club in South Africa
Mastered @ Ricsurf Studio, CapeTown

01 - Come Stay  TheMahoganyRoom Session

04 - Hold On (TheMahoganyRoom Session)

06 - Nuvola (TheMahoganyRoom Session)

07 - Paradise (TheMahoganyRoom Session)

Love Your Abuser Remixed

Astrology Days (The One AM Radio Remix)

Birds (Lymbyc Systym Remix)

Par Avion

Another off the Debut album from 2001. Bringing back memories! Cry one out to this one for me.

Float

Cecilia's Fruit

helpcomputer.ca

helpcomputer.bandcamp.com/

twitter.com/#!/sinewavemusic

facebook.com/pages/Sinewave/294146680595515

soundcloud:tracks:6142313

Sinewave - Dodecahedron

Helpcomputer Records