Uwe Schmidt

Uwe H. Schmidt (born 27 August 1968), 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 Señor Coconut.

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.

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.

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 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 (Pink Elln).

That same year, he released his debut dancefloor track, 'Whitehouse'.

More releases followed on labels like Cyclotron, Rising High, and Pod Communications, for which (as Atom Heart) he co-created with Ata and Heiko the 12" vinyl Mihon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (end of 1992 until early 1993).

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.

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.

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.

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.