Atom Heart
| Uwe Schmidt | |
|---|---|
Schmidt (left) with Thomas Fehlmann at MUTEK10, Montreal (2009)
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Uwe H. Schmidt |
| Born |
27 August 1968 Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Genres | Electronic music, postmodern music, glitch, IDM, Latin dance, techno, experimental, easy listening |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, programmer, musician, producer, graphic designer |
| Years active | 1990–present |
| Labels | Rather Interesting, Raster-Noton, Nacional Records, Fax Label |
| Associated acts | Pete Namlook |
| Website |
www www |
Uwe Schmidt (born 27 August 1968 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany), also known as Atom™, Atom Heart, or Señor Coconut, is a German composer, musician and producer of electronic music. He is often regarded as the father of electrolatino, electrogospel, and aciton music. In the nineties, Schmidt moved to Chile and developed part of his career there, adopting the alias Mr. Coconut.
Uwe Schmidt 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 of international artists, including the Canadian electronic body music act Frontline Assembly and his first musical work under the name Lassigue Bendthaus, entitled The Engineer's Love, were released. 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 4 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 (Pink Elln). 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 didn't 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.
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. (Resistance D), Ata and Heiko M/S/O (Ongaku). 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.
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