Biography
Composer and designer Uwe Schmidt stands among experimental electronic music’s most tireless post-techno figures. Through dozens of aliases he has issued singles, compilation cuts, EPs, and albums in such volume that his catalog now numbers in the hundreds, all while sustaining a near-monthly release pace on his own Rather Interesting imprint despite little more than a decade of activity. Although his initial instrument was a drum kit, Schmidt soon turned to analog electronics, swapping the acoustic drums for a machine and borrowing a four-track recorder along with several keyboards from acquaintances. His earliest pieces concentrated on dance-floor styles—chiefly hardcore techno, acid, and trance—yet by the middle of the 1990s his approach had moved beyond the monochrome patterns of conventional club music toward dense, multi-layered constructions resistant to easy genre classification. Blending techno, acid, ambient, jazz, funk, electro, ’60s exotica, and psychedelic rock, his mature output remains highly rhythmic yet resists reduction to dance music, occupying a singular zone where forward-looking authorship meets playful experimentation within contemporary electronica.
Already productive under the early monikers I, Atomu Shinzo, Bi-Face, and Mike McCoy, Atom Heart intensified his output in the early-to-mid 1990s through ties with the Frankfurt-based trance and ambient label Fax. Solo and collaborative releases alongside Tetsu Inoue and label head Pete Namlook helped shape the melodic hard-trance and techno aesthetic linked to the Frankfurt scene while allowing excursions into other electronic territories, notably ambient, the direction to which Fax largely redirected its energies. A series of Fax albums appeared during those years, among them Orange, Datacide, Softcore, and Coeur Atomique, before Namlook created Rather Interesting as a Fax subsidiary devoted to Atom Heart projects. Although he continues to record under additional names—most prominently Lassigue Bendthaus and the Lisa Carbon Trio—his primary attention stayed with Rather Interesting, where he maintained a steady monthly CD schedule and developed a refined, distinctive aesthetic. Each title was pressed in editions of one thousand copies, yet many rank among the most accomplished post-techno experimental works, employing intricate split-channel treatments and fluid melodic-rhythmic transitions within an iterative, near-mathematical eclecticism.
Between 1999 and 2000 Schmidt reached a wider American audience through several projects, beginning with Flanger’s Templates, recorded with Bernd Friedman of Nonplace Urban Field and issued on Ninja Tune’s Ntone sub-label. Two covers albums followed in 2000: Pop Artificielle, released as lb via Shadow, presented synth-pop renditions of hits including Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”; El Baile Aleman, issued by Emperor Norton under the alias Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto, reinterpreted Kraftwerk material in Latin style. The Dos Tracks project delivered its debut album the next year, though wider distribution arrived only in 2002. Schmidt has also occasionally turned to remixing, reworking tracks by Prong, Pankow, the Swamp Zombies, and Resistance D.
Already productive under the early monikers I, Atomu Shinzo, Bi-Face, and Mike McCoy, Atom Heart intensified his output in the early-to-mid 1990s through ties with the Frankfurt-based trance and ambient label Fax. Solo and collaborative releases alongside Tetsu Inoue and label head Pete Namlook helped shape the melodic hard-trance and techno aesthetic linked to the Frankfurt scene while allowing excursions into other electronic territories, notably ambient, the direction to which Fax largely redirected its energies. A series of Fax albums appeared during those years, among them Orange, Datacide, Softcore, and Coeur Atomique, before Namlook created Rather Interesting as a Fax subsidiary devoted to Atom Heart projects. Although he continues to record under additional names—most prominently Lassigue Bendthaus and the Lisa Carbon Trio—his primary attention stayed with Rather Interesting, where he maintained a steady monthly CD schedule and developed a refined, distinctive aesthetic. Each title was pressed in editions of one thousand copies, yet many rank among the most accomplished post-techno experimental works, employing intricate split-channel treatments and fluid melodic-rhythmic transitions within an iterative, near-mathematical eclecticism.
Between 1999 and 2000 Schmidt reached a wider American audience through several projects, beginning with Flanger’s Templates, recorded with Bernd Friedman of Nonplace Urban Field and issued on Ninja Tune’s Ntone sub-label. Two covers albums followed in 2000: Pop Artificielle, released as lb via Shadow, presented synth-pop renditions of hits including Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”; El Baile Aleman, issued by Emperor Norton under the alias Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto, reinterpreted Kraftwerk material in Latin style. The Dos Tracks project delivered its debut album the next year, though wider distribution arrived only in 2002. Schmidt has also occasionally turned to remixing, reworking tracks by Prong, Pankow, the Swamp Zombies, and Resistance D.
Albums