When I heard that Ulrich Schnauss was going to be playing at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace, my reaction was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, a rock club seemed like a poor place to experience the sounds of new age keyboard bliss soaring through the skies (or whatever other hyperbolic description you’d want to apply to someone who sounds, in the most fantastic possible way, like Yanni on a hard drug come down), but on the other hand, Lee’s is literally just down the street from my house, which is nothing short of awesome.
As it turned out, standing rammed into a crowded rock bar to see an act better suited to stoned bliss on the couch was certainly not ideal, and the sound system’s bass threatened to overwhelm almost all of the delicacy of the music, but none of that really ended up mattering; just watching the bookish-looking little German hunched over his bank of synths pounding out some of the most epic and uplifting music imaginable was still a treat (seriously, it was like the first time I listened to “Chariots of Fire” when I was 4 years old).
And to top it off, once he finished, I was able to walk up the street, drop off my jacket and backpack that I still had with me from work, and then saunter back down to catch the headlining M83. How cool is that?
