by RAF KATIGBAK

Over the phone from a London hotel, German producer Ulrich Schnauss excitedly explains why My Bloody Valentine has currently risen to the top of every electronic producer's namedropping list. "I think [My Bloody Valentine guitarist/producer] Kevin Shields is basically the last person in popular music history so far to have really changed the sound of music. I mean, every music genre in the last 10 years, if you look very closely, has something in it that you could trace back to My Bloody Valentine. I don't think there's any other musician on the planet of whom that can be said."

Not surprisingly, you don't have to listen too closely to Schnauss's recently re-issued full-length A Strangely Isolated Place (on Domino) to hear the pioneering mid-'90s U.K. shoegazer's influence. With its lush synth arrangements, epic production, brooding tones and raw emotional power, it's no wonder that Schnauss's follow-up to his already classic debut Far Away Trains Passing By is quickly becoming a crossover hit with techno junkies and diehard indie kids alike.

It's Schnauss's ability to walk the line between the melancholic and the uplifting that really sets him apart from most of his micro-obsessed techno contemporaries. The bittersweet mood was inspired not by Schnauss's childhood in the quiet northern port town of Kiel, Germany, but rather the crowded creative capital of his adopted home, Berlin. "I'd say that I was a lot more lonely in Berlin than I was in Kiel. There was never really a music scene in Kiel but I had a lot of people to hang out with. I've been in Berlin for eight years and eventually you only get in touch with people who are in a music background. There's always a business side, so your relationships are not really deep in a personal sense of the word.

"Also," he adds, "I never really fit in well with this electronic underground scene. I mean, I think I was always mentioning the wrong records that I liked or dressing in the wrong clothes or whatever, so I always felt a little isolated and strange in Berlin."

With M83 at Cabaret on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 9 p.m., $16

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