Ulrich Schnauss "Stars"

Berlin producer Ulrich Schnauss gained fans outside of the insular techno world by warmly embracing 90's shoegaze on his 2003 record, A Strangely Isolated Place. If the finest compliment rock centric reviewers could think to bestow on Schnauss' efforts was that they could slip seemlessly into a Slowdive mix tape, let me go a step further. "Stars", from his almost released new disc Goodbye, blows those guitar band influences out of the water.
As the genre name's allusion to eye averting suggests, the problem with shoegaze was a lack of direct connection. Only a few visionary artists could produce sounds alien and alluring enough to make up for the buried vocals and the preference for place shuffling over really moving. Schnauss takes from the best of all worlds, providing the sun warped and swirling textures underneath, but never obscuring the lovely ethereal female vocal at the forefront. As his dance music pedigree mandates, the rhythm is never an afterthought. As a result, the dense melodies are given the slightest bit of dance floor traction. Like Gui Boratto's "Beautiful Life," it's a line of uncut bliss. Don't let this record falls into the hands of ecstasy soused teens, lest we be plagued by a series of tragic mass huggings.