Uwe Schmidt
Uwe H. Schmidt, also known as Atom™, Atom Heart, or Señor Coconut, is a German composer, musician and producer of electronic music. He was active in the development of electrolatino, electrogospel, and aciton music. In the nineties, Schmidt moved to Chile and developed part of his career there, adopting the alias Señor Coconut.
Biography
1983–1990
Uwe Schmidt was born in Frankfurt. He began making music in the early 1980s, first playing drums, then switching to programming a drum computer after he had heard a Linn Drum on the radio. In 1986, he co-founded the cassette label N.G. Medien, on which various tapes were released, featuring international artists such as Canadian electronic body music act Front Line Assembly, as well as his own first musical work as Lassigue Bendthaus, entitled The Engineer's Love.Soon after, he started to work on what would become his first official Lassigue Bendthaus record release, the album Matter. The recordings and production for Matter began in 1986 and took almost four years, until the album finally came out in 1991 on the German Parade Amoureuse label. Matter as well as its related singles and maxi-singles were recorded and mixed by Tobias Freund. That same year, he released his debut dancefloor track, 'Whitehouse'. More releases followed on labels like Cyclotron, Rising High, and Pod Communications, for which he co-created with Ata and Heiko the 12" vinyl Mihon.
Lassigue Bendthaus, until that point, was musically categorized as EBM, even though part of the success of Matter may have been the fact that it did not quite fit the category and already incorporated musical elements of the 1990s. Uwe Schmidt played his first live show as Lassigue Bendthaus as the opening act for the British group Meat Beat Manifesto at the Frankfurt Batschkapp in 1989.
1991–1994
Still living in Frankfurt, Uwe Schmidt was directly influenced by the emerging "pre-techno" movement of the late 1980s known as house and acid house. A sub-label of Parade Amoureuse released some of Schmidt's dance floor oriented productions under the alias Atom Heart which he adopted as his main artist name from then on. The early 1990s saw a series of 12-inch vinyl productions, mainly aimed at the dance floor, which were released under a variety of different project titles such as Atom Heart, Slot, etc.In 1992, he was in charge of producing a series of tracks for the yet to be widely known DJs Pascal F.E.O.S., Ata and Heiko M/S/O. Uwe Schmidt produced and co-wrote titles such as "Ongaku" and "Cosmic Love", which became successful prototypes for the appearing trance movement. His activities as a music producer continued with the Austrian multimedia artists Station Rose whom had just moved from Vienna to Frankfurt in 1992. The 12-inch "Digit Eyes" was produced by Schmidt and Station Rose the same year. During the production of "Digit Eyes" he was introduced to Tetsu Inoue, a New York-based Japanese electronic music producer, with whom he founded the Datacide project in 1993.
Out of the N.G. Medien nucleus the record label POD Communication was founded in 1992. After the bankruptcy of Parade Amoureuse and its sub-labels in 1992, Schmidt moved his activities to POD Communication on which he released a series of 12-inches and albums under the guises of Atom Heart, Lisa Carbon and Atomu Shinzo. Also releasing on POD Communication was the German artist Pete Namlook whom Uwe Schmidt first met at the POD office in Frankfurt. Due to his releases on Parade Amoureuse and POD Communication and his successful production works, Schmidt had quickly obtained a reputation that let him play live concerts all around the world. Together with Tobias Freund, who by then used the Pink Elln pseudonym, Schmidt played a live show at one of the first rave parties ever in Finland in 1992. The live concert was recorded and released on Ongaku Music in 1992, known as "Elektronikkaa – Atom Heart & Pink Elln live in Montreux and Helsinki".
A vast amount of productions were released worldwide due to the licensing activities of POD Communication, Ongaku Music and a variety of other Frankfurt-based record companies. After Parade Amoureuse closed down in 1992, his first album Matter was re-released by the Italian record label Contempo Records from Florence.
In 1993, Schmidt released the follow-up album to Matter: Lassigue Bendthaus' Cloned. Cloned was produced and licensed to Contempo Records together with a sample CD titled Cloned:Binary which contained the sounds used on the original album. Contempo Records went bankrupt in 1993.
Due to open payments by those labels, lack of a recording studio and unresolved recording contracts, Schmidt decided to take some months off and lived for half a year in Costa Rica. On the way back from Costa Rica, he stopped over in New York City, where he visited Tetsu Inoue to record the first Datacide album. Back home in Frankfurt, his interest in Latin Music started to grow and in fact the birth of the Señor Coconut moniker can be located somewhere around that time. Even though Lassigue Bendthaus had not brought him much luck until then, he decided to start recording his third album during 1993 entitled Render. Because of the stagnation and inherent ignorance of the techno movement that surrounded Schmidt's work, he soon began to distance from this musical format and scene. He also felt that the DJ and the dance floor were limiting targets for his musical output and that many of his musical ideas would not be compatible with it. As a consequence he founded his own record label Rather Interesting in 1994.
By this time, Pete Namlook had founded his FAX +49-69/450464 label and a new scene of musical styles appeared, such as ambient, jungle, IDM and others. Schmidt collaborated with Namlook under the names Millenium and as Subsequence.
Uwe Schmidt, apart from his monthly release on Rather Interesting, continued recording with Tetsu Inoue, Pete Namlook and Victor Sol during 1994. That same year, the Lassigue Bendthaus albums Render, Render Audible , Matter, Cloned and the 12-inch "Overflow" were released by the Belgian KK Records, a label that would officially declare bankruptcy in 2000. Right after the release and re-release of the Lassigue Bendthaus albums, Schmidt began to work on the last album to be released under that project name called Pop Artificielle.
1995–1998
In 1995, Uwe Schmidt collaborated with Bill Laswell and Tetsu Inoue on the Fax release Second Nature, which was recorded at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn. Toward the end of 1995, another collaboration was concretized in Tokyo where Schmidt, Inoue, and Yellow Magic Orchestra founder Haruomi Hosono recorded the first HAT album, which was released on Schmidt's Rather Interesting label and Haruomi Hosono's Daisy World Discs. In an effort to escape the German winter, Schmidt spent the ends of 1994 and 1995 in Australia. A man with the same idea was the German music producer Bernd Friedmann, whom he met in Melbourne in 1995.Two more +N and Datacide albums were produced between 1993 and 1996 as well as one album each month on Rather Interesting, all of them under different names that Schmidt later refers to as working titles, headlines, or simply "words that label a musical idea" rather than being aliases or projects in the traditional sense. Logically all works of Uwe Schmidt would later be summarized under just one name: Atom™. With a lot of traveling, playing live shows worldwide, such as the Love Parade in 1994 and Sonar Barcelona in 1994, as well as the stagnation to be felt in his European surroundings, Schmidt prepared for his departure from the old continent. Together with Dandy Jack, with whom he formed the project Gon, two live shows were played in Santiago de Chile in March and October 1996. Schmidt and the Chilean Dandy Jack, who lived all his life in Germany and Spain, on their way back from Chile, decided to try to relocate to Santiago in 1997.
1996 finally saw Schmidt's Señor Coconut idea come to realization. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts during 1993–1995, still living in Frankfurt, he recorded eight tracks in the later declared electrolatino style. In a fever dream, the name Señor Coconut, placed on top of a coconut texture, a design that would become the artwork of the first Señor Coconut album, appeared to him. Even though Schmidt tried to complete the album in Frankfurt, the preparations for his move to Chile prevented this. In March 1997, Schmidt, together with his colleague Dandy Jack, moved to Santiago de Chile, where they shared a rented house and installed their studios. During March and April, he finished the El Gran Baile album, which would be the first work bearing the name of Señor Coconut.
Uwe Schmidt continued releasing one album per month on his Rather Interesting label, although due to the difficulties of adaptation in Chile, decided to reduce his output. Akashic Records, a Tokyo-based label owned by Tōwa Tei, licensed El Gran Baile for the territory of Japan. Tōwa Tei further requested a remix by Uwe Schmidt. By the end of 1997 Uwe Schmidt and Dandy Jack's ways split and Uwe moved out of the shared house.
During 1998, Tetsu Inoue and Haruomi Hosono visited Uwe in Santiago. The second HAT album was recorded. Toward the end of 1998, on his way back from Australia to Germany, Bernd Friedmann stopped over in Santiago and together with Uwe Schmidt they recorded their first Flanger album called Templates, which was recorded in a programming tour de force of one week at Uwe's Mira, Musica! studio and released in 1999 on the British Ninja Tune label.
1999–2003
Lassigue Bendthaus' last album, Pop Artificielle, was finally finished and released in 1999. Due to a record company decision the album was released under the name of LB. Pop Artificielle caused quite a media reaction worldwide, due to the fact that the album contained electronic cover versions of famous pop and rock songs. Pop Artificielle stylistically may be considered as being one of the first productions that merged song structures with sounds coming from a '90s techno background, and an initial point for the development of the glitch genre.During the production process of Pop Artificielle, the idea was born to cover the German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk in a yet-to-be-defined style and as a different production. Meant to be rough sketches, Uwe Schmidt started to program a couple of Kraftwerk cover versions in traditional cha-cha-cha arrangement and decided to make this the second Señor Coconut album. Entertained by the result of the first programmings, he produced a total of 4 songs which he sent to some record companies. One of those companies, Tōwa Tei's Akashic Records, immediately licensed the album, entitled El Baile Alemán, releasing it upon completion of the production in 2000. Uwe Schmidt obtained official permission by Kraftwerk themselves to release El Baile Alemán, though had to remove his version of "Radioactivity". European and North American record companies remained uninterested until triggered by the hype El Baile Alemán had caused in Japan. Soon a European, North American, Mexican, Hong Kong and a Russian release followed and the title "Showroom Dummies" was featured in the Mexican movie Y Tu Mamá También.
Señor Coconut's first European tour started on 19 August 2000 in Germany. A US headlining tour was scheduled, but had to be canceled because of visa problems of one of the 7 Chilean musicians that accompanied Schmidt. In parallel to Señor Coconut project, Schmidt continued working on rather obscure ideas, some for Rather Interesting, some that were released on other labels, such as the Geeez 'n' Gosh albums which musically merge abstract electronic programmings and gospel vocals. Geeez 'n' Gosh was released on the German Mille Plateaux label, which went bankrupt in 2004, leaving Schmidt as well as many fellow musicians, unpaid. The Flanger project was also continued, Friedman and Schmidt recording the Inner Space/Outer Space album in Santiago de Chile, which was then released in 2001.