Listening to electronic artist Popnoname is like eating candy — immediately sweet, difficult to stop doing and sometimes a guilty pleasure. Equally at home creating droning ambient pieces, baroque harmonic progressions and four-on-the-floor dance jams, Poponame, born Jens-Uwe Beyer, hails from the same scene in Cologne, Germany, that produced the influential techno label Kompakt. This Friday at Shanti, Beyer will bring all his styles to the weekly “Subelectronica” event that the club hosts.

"I work intuitively," Beyer said in an email interview. “All my tracks are an ambient sound in the beginning, sometimes it becomes a pop song, sometimes it becomes a techno track, sometimes it ends as the ambient track it was in the beginning. It depends on my mood."

Beyer put out his debut LP, “White Album,” in 2007 on German label Italic after a series of 12-inch releases and remixes. Blending the same lush production as his singles, the album launched him onto stages around the world, putting him in high demand as a remixer. Kompakt, which releases a yearly compilation called “Pop Ambient” featuring various European techno artists doing their best to remove the concept of a beat, has featured Beyer on the past five such discs. The glacial synth tones of “Fembria,” from 2008’s collection, unfolds over a five-minute span as Beyer stacks echoing layer over echoing layer of timbres, culminating in a massive, reverb-drenched drone that makes it easy to forget the absence of melody.

"I love to produce ambient music, because the sound directly comes out of me — no thinking, just doing," Beyer said. "Fembria" was “much faster in the beginning. That was by daylight — at night, I changed the instruments and made it much slower."

Such starkly simple creations are even more amazing compared with the ear candy of Popnoname’s most recent release, “Surrounded By Weather.” Where his “Pop Ambient” creations eschew hooks and choruses for the power of mood, “Surrounded By Weather” features carefully constructed songs with intimate lyrics (sung in high-pitched English) that could be easily interpreted with different instruments into radio-ready pop songs. What sets these tracks apart from generic pop music is the same aesthetic that goes into Beyer’s ambient oeuvre: He knows how to use different sounds like paint on a canvas. But with such a broad palette of colors to work with, knowing when to stop is just as important.

"A track is finished when the message comes over," says Beyer. "It's a question of character, in which moment you finish the track. In my case, I finish the track the first time I think —'That's it.' If I start to change some little things, it's a complete other track in the end. I don't like this. ... Other musicians love these little changes in the end ... I like it rough."

This concert, his third in Moscow, will not feature Beyer tweaking knobs between turntables; he promises to incorporate all aspects of his trade.

"I always play live, which means laptop, guitar and microphone. I’m not a DJ," he insists.

"Sometimes I play with a band, but then it becomes a bit different, because I don`t say 'Play this and play this.' It sounds then more like a session, or like krautrock."

Such diverse sounds speak of even more diverse influences, but Beyer claims that his muse springs less from the music he enjoys than from his surroundings, one of which Muscovites can definitely relate to.

"The music I listen to is different to the music I produce ... music is no inspiration for me. It's the people, the time, the art of living — and the most important thing: the weather!"

Popnoname plays April 17 at Shanti. 2/1 Myasnitsky Pereulok. Metro Krasniye Vorota. 783-6868. www.shanti.ru.