By Peter Nicholson

So strange the change: German producer Ulrich Schnauss explores new musical territory with his second full-length, A Strangely Isolated Place (Domino).

Sure, there was an immediate parallel between the title of the German producer's second album and the barren landscape through which I sped, but really it came down to a shared beauty. The red rocks, blue skies, and fluffy white clouds of the Southwest were almost cliché in their grandeur, and Schnauss's aching melodies, steady rhythms, and inexorable climaxes seemed almost painfully familiar, but both blew the cobwebs off my mind and heart, reminding me that sometimes it's OK to revel in pretty landscapes and beautiful music.

Reached on his phone before a sound check in Washington, D.C. (he's currently touring the States with M83), Schnauss is graciously embarrassed when I describe his album as beautiful, but he seems eager to pin down the meaning of the word. "Beautiful can also mean happy or shiny in a superficial way," Schnauss says, "and I think beautiful has to have something like a melancholic or sad element to it. If it has that, then I think it's great, and that is exactly what I'm trying to do, but I'm not trying to do happy music."

What Schnauss is trying to do falls somewhere between rock and electronica, into an area that reflects seemingly disparate influences like shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine and ambient/trip-hop experimenters the Orb.

Born in the northern fishing port of Kiel, Schnauss moved to Berlin in the mid-'90s in his mid-20s, and his first forays into production included drum 'n' bass and techno singles under the Ethereal 77 and View to the Future monikers. But those efforts were a bit off from where his true heart lay. "Generally, I was never too happy with the dance music stuff that I tried to do. I just didn't really have the confidence to do completely my own thing and not care about any other genres that were trendy at the moment," he says.

It wasn't until 1999 that Schnauss was self-assured enough to move away from electronic music that might conceivably get played by Berlin DJs and put together a collection of more personal songs that would eventually become Far away Trains Passing By, released by the small German label City Centre Offices.

A short, striking album that takes in spare break beats and ambient washes, Far away Trains will be rereleased with a bonus disc of remixes and singles this summer in the States by Domino, which, although Schnauss understands the sound business sense behind the decision, leaves him a bit bemused. "Obviously that release is not done in a way that I would do if I would record it today. On the other hand, it's not a record that I'm embarrassed about, that I think is really horrible, like some of the stuff before that," he adds with a laugh.

In contrast, Strangely Isolated Place did remarkably well for a primarily instrumental album with no hope of radio play. Strangely Isolated Place represented a further progression for Schnauss, a more wholehearted embrace of the lush instrumentation and strong melodies of bands like Chapterhouse. Songs such as "In All the Wrong Places" – with its metallic ping-pong rhythm beneath unabashed washes of melody that build to a crescendo of synths (despite Schnauss's inspirations, there are no real guitars) that breaks like a long-anticipated first kiss – wear their hearts on their sleeves, brushing close to maudlin melodrama but somehow coming away clean.

Schnauss is currently working on a new album, which he says will continue in a similar vein but with two major changes. "The first thing is the new stuff is much shorter – they've got a more traditional song structure to them, more like four or five minutes," he explains. "This was quite a challenge to me because I wanted to try to condense these kind of epic, eight-minute things, their intensity, into four minutes, which is, I think, not that easy a thing to do. And the other thing is that I think all the stuff is a bit more radical in that the ambient things are really ambient and laid-back and the upbeat, distorted things are a lot more fucked-up on the new record."

Although the idea that electronic music is soulless has long ago been blown aside, Schnauss's compositions are nonetheless strikingly emotional, and it's not surprising that the musician is most moved when people adopt them as their own. "I'm really happy when I meet people and they explain to me what kind of feelings or memories they combine with my music," he says. "That's just the best thing because I have the same feelings with the music I like as well.... There was a young couple from Reading, near London, who told me that they always listen to Strangely Isolated Place when they got married, on the train back or something, and since then they always associate that record with their marriage. I like things like that – that's nice."

Ulrich Schnauss performs with M83 Thurs/28, 8 p.m., Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, S.F. $15. (415) 474-0365.