If you like your electronica swoonsome, you’ll probably have plenty of time for Ulrich Schnauss. 

His 2001 debut Far Away Trains Passing By, which juxtaposed shoegazy distortion with prim (or, depending on who you’re asking, twee) melody lines, didn’t exactly shred the rulebook, but it won plenty of admirers at the time. Subsequent LPs A Strangely Isolated Place (2003) and Goodbye (2007) saw the shoegaze influence become increasingly accentuated, and he’s since gone the whole hog, releasing a full-length with Mark Peters of dream-pop outfit Engineers earlier this year.

Schnauss now has a new album due in the not-too-distant future. A Long Way To Fall will arrive on Schnauss’ own Scripted Realities imprint, and will be his fourth solo full-length. Schnauss promises a concerted “change in direction”, and stresses that the synthesiser will be front and centre on the record:

“Throughout the last decade, I recorded three albums that were trying to translate the early 90’s shoegaze aesthetic into an electronic context.  After finishing the last album, Goodbye, I felt a need for a change of direction. At the same time, my music taste was changing drastically…This provided the main inspiration of trying to record an album that would celebrate the synthesizer as the very capable musical instrument that it is, but without the need to disguise them behind a wall of echo and reverb”.

No firm release date as yet, but A Long Way To Fall is expected to drop in early 2013. Old cut ‘Goodbye’ is below.

Tracklisting:
Her And The Sea
Broken Homes
Like A Ghost In Your Own Life
A Long Way To Fall
I Take Comfort In Your Ignorance
A Forgotten Birthday
The Weight Of Darkening Skies
Borrowed Time
Ten Years
A Ritual In Time And Death