RFI – Uwe Schmidt (a.k.a. Atom Heart, Flanger, Senior Coconut, etc.)

I've probably heard 10-15 of his albums on Rather Interesting, give or take. A few of them are very, very good, a few are the opposite, and most are somewhere in between. By far my favorite is the Flowerhead album by Datacide (Atom Heart & Tetsu Inoue), which is an absolutely brilliant piece of deep, rich, subtle ambience that works well at just about every volume level -- I listened to it every night when I went to sleep, at very low volume, for over a month. That's been reissued on Asphodel and it ought to be pretty easy to get.

Datacide's Ondas album is wildly different and, to my mind, not nearly as good. If you like Atom Heart's jokier/tiki-lounge side it may appeal to you, but it was a disappointment to me when I first bought it. I've warmed up to it a bit, though, and there are some nice passages. (Still a few too many gags, though.)

Atom Heart's Dots is probably my second-favorite. It takes a fairly small set of simple sounds and creates elaborate, cyclical, pointillistic ambient structures out of them. I reviewed it on my site a few months back.

Another Schmidt/Inoue collaboration, Masters of Psychedelic Ambience, has some very nice moments. It doesn't work on the same high level as Flowerhead, but it's still worth a listen. It's a bit more of an episodic aural journey, passing through myriad distinct sound-worlds (I think it has something like 28 tracks), and listening to it in that frame of mind, I enjoy it.

But these kinds of albums are only a small part of Atom Heart's output, too. Most of his recent stuff like Dropshadow Disease is far more beat-oriented, and by and large, is much less exciting to me. Probably the best of that crop would be the two Roger Tubesound Ensemble albums, especially the second one that just came out a little bit ago. The stock description would be that it's a "skewed take on electro-jazz" or something like that, and that's more or less accurate, but it's more interesting than that description would suggest.

All his stuff under the name Lassigue Bendthaus (Especially _Render_ and _Pop Artificial_). - This was his EBM project. All his stuff under the name Senor Coconut - One of his many Latinish projects. All his stuff under the name HAT - HAT is his collaboration project w/ Tetsuo Inou and Hosono _Schnitstelle_ -wierd serious jazzy IDM

Avoid: Dropshadow Disease Fonosandwich Superfical Depth XXX and a bunch more, but most of his output is very hard to find so it wont be too difficult to avoid it.

from gabber to glitchy, he does the lot.

talented bastard.
*

the new senor coconut single is a cover of smoke on the water - it's pretty grebt. :-)

i really like pop artificielle, too. the ashes to ashes cover is quite nice.

Was it intended as a joke or is the joke analysis simply the easiest to apply/first to come to mind? After all, who would dare do that to Kraftwerk songs? (gasp) Musicians should only *sample* Kraftwerk records and continue to rehash 20 year old washed out ideas. Riiigghhtttt.

does anybody have:

1) any opinion on whether the "flextone" and "dots" reissues are worth the $25- asking price?? (i guess it's better than competing with the geeks on ebay who are willing to drop $50-$100 for any disc even remotely related to FAX)

2) any information on how far they intend to keep this going? or a tentative schedule?? to be honest i'm not so enthused about the early RI albums but i would kill for reissues of "silver sound 60", "B.A.S.S. (binary amplified super stereo)", "machine paisley", "mono (tm)" and the collab with hosono + inoue "new york / tokyo / frankfurt"

(btw that list right there is my "atom heart: s/d" "search" column)

not got the reissues .. so cannott advise on how these compare to the orig's.

i had no ideaa that FAX/Atom stuff was now so collectable !

eeek.

may have to look into insurance .. its not that often these days that i spin these ..

another good'un is Masters of Psychedelic Ambience that Atom made with Tetsu ..

very very 1994.

(my ambient year)

the senor coconut bidness is seriously the best thing this man has ever done

the LB pop covers album (iffy at best) + senor coconut kraftwerk (pretty excellent) + senor coconut YMO (wow) boils down to a big batch of atonement for past sins against techno and then some. listening to the yellow fever album now and I'll be damned if this isn't top shelf for a lifetime, given the source material isn't exactly what anybody with half a mind would ever call mediocre

the kind of pron music that would make you stop watching the porn

nice cover

http://www.essayrecordings.com/media/bilder/cdsundvinyl/coconutfmcover.jpg

the senor coconut bidness is seriously the best thing this man has ever done

absolute nonsense.

anyone heard that comp?

i heard it when it came out but i don't remember.

he has some of the best album covers (midisport, los samplers) but too much of his music is way too blurpy/glitchy for me. i do like a lot of the los samplers album, though

http://www.discogs.com/release/49659

crap music, classic cover

also a schmidt-obsessed friend of mine says this is one of his very best but i expect more of the same old:
http://www.discogs.com/release/49662

I have it -- some of the Cumbia is pretty dope, particularly a female vocal track xposts re: CoCoFM

whoops forgot about flanger! midnight Sound and innerspace-outterspace are both great.. great cover of "so what" on the former... great grooves all around..

"past sins against techno"? that "live in valparaiso" with pink elln is pretty rad. i was there (sorry, unintentional "losing my edge" moment) and it was brilliant live -- recorded on a pier in the harbor in valpo, chile.

i tried to get him to tell me who the cover model for "coconut FM" was, but he refused.

its gloria estefan

winston: the Naturalist is pretty good.

I like these two best: http://www.discogs.com/release/104173 and http://www.discogs.com/release/58981.

Coconut FM is really good in general but especially so for including my favourite cumbia villera track on it (llegamos los pibes chorros).

atom hearts studio

love it.
completely opposite to what i envisaged.
though i do wonder if this is a wind up, andhe secretly goes off to a secret hi-tech setup when there are no cameras around.

How would it be higher tech? He has a laptop and midi controller right there, unless you mean just a bunch more knobs or a better mic setup.

v. true.
i guess its just me that cant get my head around the fact that such spacious sounding music (eg. Dots) can come out of a skinny laptop as opposed to an old fashioned bunch of analogue synths and studio monitors. etc.
still, its a seriously uncomfortable looking chair he's got there.

What do folks (by which I mean, anyone other than Phil) think of Datcide's Flowerhead? Been listening to it a bunch and the jury's still out for me...

astoundingly good

last year's liedgut was so good.

new album "1i3835tra3um3" is gorgeous

as is last year's winterreise (preaching in the desert)

We're listening to youtubes.

Has anyone heard the Atom & Tobias Freund collab 'Grand Blue'? It's supposedly an accidental recording of them drunk playing in a hotel lobby??

210 albums released in total!

http://www.atom-tm.com/portada.php?menu=DISCOGRAPHY&view=DISCOGRAPHY

anyone into the recent stuff?

not heard anything in years .. sorry.
though having :
orange/b2 live/softcore/dots/live @ sel/flextone/jet chamber/second nature etc
(i.e. anything related to the glory years of FAX (rip))
means i have enough.
that said, if i see anything in the bins with his name on it, i buy it.
just that this is a seriously rare occurrence these days.

I'll freely admit that I haven't heard a huge chunk of this guy's stuff, but from the last few years, I loved alien symphony, thought winterreise and liedgut were both a little uneven but w/some amazing highlights (particularly the "mittlere composition" tracks - v reminiscent of the b-side of hosono's making of non-standard music), and hd was a little lame but had its moments

I thought Alien Symphony was great as well. I think you were the one that recommended it to me. I dig Liedgut a lot too, even if it's very lightweight, the sounds on there are beautiful, and I prefer a brisk 35-minute electro workout to some of the mid-90's stuff he was doing, where every album seems to be 70+ minutes long.

i own

flowerhead
b2 (live in barcelona / berlin)
silver sound
binary amplified super stereo
machine paisley
tokyo-frankfurt-new york (HAT)
mono ™
fonosandwich

thinking of buying

dots
interactive music
ondas (datacide)
brown
built (n+)

any opinions on the ones i'm thinking of buying?

I've been listening to a lot of this guy's output lately, and it's pretty amazing how much quality stuff he managed to put out early in his career. In 1994 alone he released 8 solo albums plus 5 albums in collaboration with others, and all of those that I've managed to hear have been either good (Flextone, Morphogenetic Fields, Orange) or great (Dots, Live At sel i/s/c, Datacide, Plane). I'd say it's a fucking tragedy he abandoned the sort of sublime, adventurous ambient sound he was building on these albums in favour of some IDM wankery and electro goofiness. (Though I have enjoyed the occasional dancey project by him, like Alien Symphony.) Is there's anything in Mr. Schmidt's later catalogue that would be equivalent to the ambient/techno sound of those early records?

As far as I can tell, Flowerhead is his last "serious" effort, after that the goofy stuff starts...

I highly rate everything up to RI40, especially RI30, RI31 and RI32

Really? Out of curiosity I bought "Machine Paisley" (RI35), because it was one of the more reasonably priced Rather Interesing releases, but the IDM sound on it was just so limp and thin, and his humour does nothing to me. Can you say what post-Flowerhead albums are non-IDM/non-goofy?

winterreise, liedgut and 1i3835tra3um3 are all great

the second geeez n gosh album "nobody knows" is always remaindered for pennies somewhere and FLIPIN AWESOME

more regarding to tuomas's request, the dos tracks would probably be of interest

minus that first "to"

and make that the dos tracks *album*, cannot fkn type

What's the opinion on VSVN? That one and Flextone are the only ones among his early albums that I haven't got yet, but since VSVN was never reissued, you have to pay quite a sum for even a used copy, so I'm wondering whether it's worth the price?

only ever got DOTS and Flextone of the RI label (oh, just rememnbered, Masters of Psych Ambiance with Testuo), never seen nor heard VSVN ..

for those into his jazzy-funky glitchy stuff, naturalist from 1998 has recently been added to Spotify and it's a good one if you dig that style.

i hope he reissues Masters Of Psychedelic Ambiance...

haven't heard that one, what's it like?

it's sort of all over the place.. soft swooping sounds, drones, bells, field recordings, a few downtempo clicky things that kinda remind me of Voices From The Lake... it's pretty cohesive and almost low-key, though, despite the variety.

i prefer the jazzy-funky glitchy stuff

I wasn't super impressed by Masters of Psychedelic Ambience, it's basically a showcase of different sounds Schmidt and Inoue came up with, 20+ short tracks with each track highlighting a new sound. Fun to listen for a while, but not much depth to it, IMO it doesn't have the the sort of long-lasting pleasure the Datacide albums (particulary Flowerhead) have, if we're talking about Atom/Inoue collabs.

yeah but that's what i like about it! short ambient tracks are cool!

but yeah the Datacide albums are great

One of the biggest dogs, its off its chain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNG3Qw9e9k

definition of the big dog in fact

bit overplayed again now tho!

That's a good one. Not too dear now that it's been repressed. This guy has so many guises it's difficult to know where to start. Some of the more dance floor orientated stuff is only available on CD any way. This one for an example..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqgLKtt0uns

that cold memories release on sähkö is pretty good

he plays every couple years at a music festival i've gone to and tends to attend most of the other events during the fest, seems like a dude who loves to hang out and listen to other sets w/friends, too

he did a set as atom(tm) with robin fox, a visual dude who does insane laser and light shows, that was intense

guys why in the fuck did no one ever tell me about about SURTEK COLLECTIVE and the invention of "acitone"??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6IWZTI6br4

lol what the hell was that

I've seen uwe schmidt live a couple times in the last few years but somehow was ignorant of that project

I'm guessing the name is inspired by nortec collective?

i've basically lost track of time since 2010 (2017 is my attempted return to temporality and the real world) but one thing has been fairly constant:
i've gone to mutek in montreal six of seven years
uwe schmidt has had a performance of at least one of his projects nearly every year
he sticks around and attends shows the entire weekend and seems like a chill dude

the flanger show last year was pretty cool

compare to original

that shari vari vid is one of my favorite things ever

kinda fell off this dude after "HD", what's worth hearing now?

Love that Surtek! Thanks.

https://headphonecommute.com/2020/04/27/in-the-studio-with-atom/

this was a cracking read.

Headline suggests a minimal studio, images proceed to show a load of very tasty gear. Not an excessive amount but come round my gaff if you want to see not "too much".

yeah, images do imply that, but the interview provides a different insight.

this new album is pretty fun, haven't really caught up with him since HD

does he still use a dozen different names or is it pretty much all done as Atom TM right now?

really good interview. thanks.

i confess that i only clip listened to the new album and found the vocals offputting. should i give it a full listen?

does he still use a dozen different names or is it pretty much all done as Atom TM right now?