Ever since the first person plugged in the electric guitar, players have been working overtime to make them sound like something else. In a sense this makes the guitar one of the earliest synthesizers, so maybe it's not shocking that a lot of that time and effort has been spent, with the aid of fretboard know-how and fancy pedals and effects, making guitars sound like actual synthesizers.
You could hear it in the hum of Robert Fripp's experiments with Brian Eno, or Robin Guthrie's wall of sound with the Cocteau Twins. After acid house, countless UK artists like Slowdive and Seefeel did it. To an extent, Sigur Rós does it. You can even hear it in Christian Fennesz's soundscapes, where his guitar playing is chopped up like any other ingredient in his glitchy pastoral techno, and you can certainly hear it with Ulrich Schnauss, whose dreamscapes owe at least as much to his guitar as they do to his mushy new age melodies and mild beats.
Goodbye, Schnauss' third record, follows two discs that wanted terribly much to be breakthroughs, 2001's Far Away Trains Passing By and 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place-- each a perfectly pleasant album that ultimately felt a few years too late. The superior A Strangely Isolated Place did incorporate amorphous vocals the same way it incorporated ethereal guitar, but it still sounded more than a little bit like background music, and not necessarily in a good way, all but demanding video accompaniment of white horses running in slow motion or time-lapse footage of flowers blooming.
If A Strangely Isolated Place lacked a little of the darkness and mystery ambient music needs to grab a hold of you, you still could admittedly sense some stylistic storm clouds lingering at the edges of the compositions that hinted at better stuff to come. The good news is that Goodbye shows Schnauss now has an even a better grasp of structure and songwriting. Tracks like the trite but lovely "Shine", "Stars", the awesomely Curve-y "Medusa" and "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" feel like more than just open-ended vamps, and, importantly, some tougher guitar adds to their impact. Some vocals are handled by Rob McVey from Longview and Judith Beck, but they're mostly mixed in like so many additional effects.
The bad news is that the overwhelming vibe is still that of easy listening digital mush, with songs such as "A Song About Hope" and "Never Be the Same" are pretty Cocteau Twins retreads that show how something once radical can become utterly banal in the wrong hands-- or the wrong decade. A few moments, like "Einfeld" and "In Between the Years", veer into the realm of aural wallpaper, like Cluster on an uninspired day, the shimmering guitars/synths a little too preset pacific in their swells and swooshes. In this context the coarsely strummed acoustic that starts the final track "For Good" is downright obnoxious, the big reveal that surprises no one beyond its self-satisfied orchestrator. It's this self-consciousness that keeps Ulrich, album after album, from fully succeeding.
As a maker of ambient music, Schnauss needs to pick a position. Does he want to lose himself in the music, to totally disappear, leaving behind nothing but a diffuse cloud of sound where a man and his terrestrial equipment once stood? Or does he want to keep exploring this pedestrian man-with-guitar-doing-weird-things field, where the musical impact is more academic than it is particularly cool or compelling? This lack of commitment is what makes Schnauss and Goodbye so frustrating. It's as if he's seen the light but, rather than share what he knows of the cosmos, chooses instead to offer a tantalizing but incomplete approximation of it.
