AtomTM

Uwe Schmidt, operating as composer and designer under the aliases Atom™ and AtomTM, ranks among the most fertile and inventive figures in post-techno experimental electronica. Through dozens of pseudonyms he has issued a torrent of singles, compilation appearances, EPs, and albums, sustaining an almost relentless album-a-month cadence on his own Rather Interesting imprint and thereby swelling his catalog into the hundreds after little more than ten years of activity.

Although drums constituted his initial instrument, Schmidt soon became captivated by analog electronics, exchanging the kit for a drum machine while borrowing a four-track recorder and assorted keyboards from acquaintances. His earliest pieces concentrated on dance-floor forms, chiefly hardcore techno, acid, and trance, yet by the middle of the 1990s the music had moved beyond the uniformity of conventional club material toward dense, intricately layered constructions resistant to single-genre classification. Blending components of techno, acid, ambient, jazz, funk, electro, 1960s exotica, and psychedelic rock, his mature output remains emphatically rhythmic yet refuses reduction to dance music, occupying instead a singular territory where forward-looking auteurist impulses meet wry experimental wit. In addition to his own projects he has occasionally turned to remixing, reshaping material by Prong, Pankow, the Swamp Zombies, Resistance D, and further artists.

Prolific already with his earliest 12-inches under the names I, Atomu Shinzo, Bi-Face, and Mike McCoy, Schmidt intensified his activity in the early-to-mid 1990s through association with the Frankfurt-based trance and ambient label Fax. Solo and collaborative releases alongside Tetsu Inoue and label founder Pete Namlook helped define the melodic hard-trance and techno aesthetic of the Frankfurt milieu while also permitting excursions into other electronic territories, above all ambient, the direction to which Fax largely redirected its energies. Several Fax titles appeared during these years, among them Orange, Datacide, Softcore, and Coeur Atomique, before Namlook launched Rather Interesting as a Fax subsidiary devoted to Atom Heart projects. Although he persisted in working under additional guises, notably Lassigue Bendthaus and the Lisa Carbon Trio, his primary focus settled on Rather Interesting, where he maintained a monthly schedule of releases whose consistent caliber belies their quantity, forging a refined and distinctive aesthetic. Pressed in editions of one thousand copies, many of these discs nevertheless count among the most accomplished specimens of post-techno experimental electronica, deploying split-channel effects, interwoven melodic and rhythmic transformations, and an iterative, nearly mathematical eclecticism that never feels merely calculated.

Between 1999 and 2000 Schmidt reached a broader American audience through several ventures, beginning with Flanger’s Templates, recorded with Bernd Friedman of Nonplace Urban Field and issued on Ninja Tune’s Ntone sublabel. Two cover albums followed in 2000: Pop Artificielle, released under the lb alias via Shadow and containing synth-pop renditions of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” and El Baile Aleman, credited to Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto and distributed by Emperor Norton, which presented Kraftwerk compositions performed in Latin style. The first album under the Dos Tracks moniker arrived the next year, though wider distribution waited until 2002. Two years afterward he issued the Los Negritos/Speed-Merengue Mega-Mix, then toured with Señor Coconut in support of the project’s 2006 album Yellow Fever! Returning to the Atom™ identity he produced a series of full-lengths that includes Liedgut (2009), Winterreise (2011), and Grand Blue (2012). Outside his own catalog he supplied remixes for stylistically varied artists such as Air, Depeche Mode, Cesária Évora, Tōwa Tei, Moreno Veloso, and Merzbow. He also formed the Surtek Collective with Vicente Sanfuentes and collaborated with Japanese composer Masaki Sakamoto. The long-developed album HD surfaced on Raster-Noton in 2013; he next joined Marc Behrens for Bauteile in 2014. The extended pieces Texturen I and Texturen II were released on Forced Exposure in 2015 and 2016, respectively. One year later he worked with singer Lisokot on the album Walzerzyklus.