Ulrich Schnauss

Born in Germany, but now based in London, producer, remixer and all-round genius Ulrich Schnauss makes music as big as the oceans. He unleashes great crashing waves of Cocteau Twins guitars, Slowdive atmospherics and precision-tooled beats that pick you up and throw you around, before depositing you somewhere else entirely – somewhere better and infinitely more beautiful. This, his third album and major-label debut, stretches this sea of sound even further, ebbing and flowing from ethereal opener ‘Never Be The Same’, to the folky strum of ‘For Good’. The standout, however, is the downright scary ‘Medusa’, which, with its layers of discordant guitars and burned-out bleeps sounds, thrillingly, like some long-lost collaboration between Kevin Shields and Kraftwerk.

Nathaniel Cramp