Goodbye

Well really, John Diliberto pretty much says it all in the above description.

Ulrich Schnauss' "Goodbye" is a sweeping, virtuosic, grand, extremely richly textured music that unashamedly soars in realms of ecstasy, bearing the unmistakeable mark of it's creator. Whereas "A Strangely Isolated Place" flew in skies of rapture, "Goodbye" expands Schnauss' vocabulary and range of expression. We still have the soaring, scintillating sheets of bliss in tracks like "Shine", beautifully sung by Rob McVey, and the almost too good to be true "Stars", but there is also a delicacy and a refined subtlety to tracks like "Einfeld" and the title piece. And just in case detractors might write Schnauss off for being too "pretty" there comes "Medusa", a powerful and dark piece full of sharp metallic sonorities and a foreboding minor key.

Schnauss' aural magic is largely achieved by massing many textures together in mixes that feature none of the instruments in predominance, but rather has them all coalesce into a gigantic tapestry of many timbral threads. For the perceptive and ACTIVE listener, there is much to discover and revel in by finding each of these threads and marvelling at their number and careful crafting. For the detail-lover Schnauss' music is a source of wonder. Pull back from close scrutiny and you have music that blends a thousand rich brush-strokes of sound like French Impressionist painting does with light and colour.

Brian Eno once spoke of creating music that both rewarded careful listening and could also be used as a background with ones attention focused elsewhere. "Goodbye' achieves that masterfully. As a background to life it is uplifting and mood enhancing. As an object of close attention and focus it presents us with whole worlds and universes of variation and wonder, like an aural rainforest.

For some fun, take a couple of Schnauss' CD's and play them along with The Cocteau Twins' "Victorianland", Spiritualized's "Lazer Guided Melodies, Mahogany's "Connectivity", Mirror System's "Mirror System" and Vidna Obmana & Jeff Pearce's "True Stories". It's "goodbye" to sharp, hard blacks and whites and "hello" to a multi-refracting cosmos of colour.

Ulrich Schnauss is someone to watch. He releases albums at a glacial pace, but it will be a pretty good bet that the next one after this will be equally rewarding and suprising. His music, so far, is full of great promise. Promise for a fascinating and unique future.

Ulrich Schnauss has always specialized on sweeping, ghostly wintry electronica, the sort of thing that gives you tundra dreams.

Technically, you can only do that so many times before people start getting tired of it. But in "Goodbye," he explores some new sounds -- Britpop meldings, ambient sweeps, and some truly epic explorations into a strange new electronic world.

It opens with gently ringing synth, which practically smothers the gentle beats and a murmuring voice that never quite forms words. Call it angel electronica. The second song is something of a stumble -- Schnauss collaborates with Long-View, in a song that sounds like a merry-go-round of stoned vocals.

But then with "Stars," he erupts into a a tightly wound melody that slowly builds to a messily epic crescendo. From there, Schnauss mingles new work with old: sleepily ambient electronica, haunting fuzz experimentals, angular creepy electropop, and more soaring epics like "Song About Hope."

It ends with a sort of mellow acoustic guitar that slowly melts into a soft synth tune... and what sounds like a musician cleaning up and leaving the studio. It's a suitable ending to what sounds like a transition album, as if Schnauss is feeling out what he can do other than sleepy electronica.

And somehow, without giving it a jumbled feel, he succeeds -- you can hear some drum machines and piano buried down there, and there's a flicker of ringing guitar in places, giving the nebulous melodies some solidarity and helping build them up.

But the overriding presence is synth. Synth, synth, synth. And here's Schnauss's real skill: he molds them into soaring epics, windblown stretches, fuzzy twists, and -- in "Medusa" -- elaborately twisted dark explorations of just how far you can push a complex melody.

Ulrich Schnauss explores some new territory in his third full-length album, the hopefully unportentous "Goodbye." But we just said hello!