Germany’s Ulrich Schnauss has a knack for weaving together various forms of electronica, as he puts it in his Red Bull Music Academy interview, “in the widest sense of the term.” Schnauss is the self-proclaimed product of both 1980s German dance music, the likes of which had been started by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, and other bands from across the spectrum of shoegaze such as The Cocteau Twins and Slowdive. But it’s Schnauss’ sixth sense for fusing these elements together which makes it work, the result of years of obsessive practice and label-hounding. While some of it verges on the sentimental side, there’s gems like “Stars”, where dampened percussion and a sort of ambient drone enhances the lyrics of a vagabond narrator, while “Between Us and Them” best captures Schnauss’ knack for capturing something between melancholia and restlessness, giving a sort of spectral feel to music that needs no words.