Ulrich Schnauss was born in northern Germany fishing port Kiel in 1977, during his formative years he grew a love for a broad spectrum of music ranging from my bloody valentine to tangerine dream, chapterhouse to early bleep & breakbeat tracks. There was not much opportunity to see some of his musical heroes in Kiel, so the inevitable pull of the big city meant a move to Berlin in 1996.
By which time Ulrich's musical output had already become prolific with a variety of pseudonyms (most notably View to the Future and Ethereal 77) veering from ambient to drum and bass via electronica. These earlier works were soon, catching the eye of Berlin electronica label CCO who took up the story:
"It came a bit of a regular thing, those anonymous packages sent to us from Berlin with a single CDR, a biro scrawl revealing at closer inspection the simple stamp 'Ethereal 77'. Ulrich had been making music for years, producing, touring, piecing together that BIG sound. And yet each of these CDR instalments revealed something a little more personal."
Soon these submissions to CCO developed into Ulrichs first album under his own name entitled Far away Trains Passing By which as it slowly seeped into peoples consciousness became an electronic classic. Listeners were taken with the lush instrumentation and the emotion of the elegant, simple and beautiful music.