Skip to main content

Ulrich Schnauss

Electric Circus, Edinburgh
Sunday March 17th 2013
4 stars
The first time Ulrich Schnauss appeared in Edinburgh, back on Easter Sunday 2008 at the Voodoo Rooms, there wasn't a still body in the room, such was the infectiousness of Schnauss' laptop-generated electronica that has since defined a mashed-up hybrid of dancefloor indie some might call Shoe-Rave. Since then, Schnauss seems to have found his time, as assorted nouveau sonic cathedralists appear to have caught up with him.

Schnauss' latest visit tied in with the release of his long-awaited fourth album under his own name, A Long Way To Fall, a deliciously warm concoction which humanises electronica in a way other laptop-based artists fear to tread. This is so even as Schnauss stands over his kit with total concentration, while a a female sidekick stands opposite him, equally rapt over her laptop.

The result of all this, with impressionistic films beamed out on the venue's multi-screen set-up behind the performers, is as panoramic and emotionally driven as anything by the guitar-driven Durutti Column, whose output Schnauss' oeuvre resembles more than any of his knob-twiddling peers.

But this is no dinner-party background chill-out routine. The volume is refreshingly pulverising, so there's a real physical whoosh to the already propulsive soundscape. It may not have the room in motion quite as much as four Easters ago – although one lone groover at the front of the stage is clearly caught in the moment's flow – but the same synapse-twanging euphoria is very much in evidence.

The List, March 2013

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h
Post a Comment
Read more