Session Transcript:
Atom Heart
Red Bull Music Academy, Rome 2004

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Uwe Schmidt, modern laptop legend and king of the pseudonym has been lost in the Chilean wilderness for the last eight years. We coaxed him out of hiding to come and talk about the science of living and breathing Latin American music, finally getting to a place where you can re-interpret Kraftwerk, and his Japanese approach to collaboration. Also on the menue: The burgeoning Frankfurt techno scene, the ongoing definition of electronic music and meditations on running your own label.

RBMA: »We’re very lucky here today, we’ve got Uwe Schmidt aka Atom Heart aka Señor Coconut aka many other aliases. I had a bit of a count when I was looking at some of the things you’ve done and I counted 62. So this is also a man who has put out at least fifty albums.«

Atom Heart: »Yeah, at least, yeah.«

RBMA: »At some point I think we should see, if we can get you to remember all of your 62 aliases.«

Atom Heart: »No, I can’t!«

RBMA: »Well, perhaps have a chat about that anyway. Although a lot people will know you from the electro/techno things, you’ve done under lots of different names Lisa Carbon Trio, Atom Heart, etc. A lot of people have been introduced to your music through the whole Señor Coconut thing, which seems to have gathered you listeners outside of the usual obsessive environment. So we’ve got a whole load of things to talk about. It would be really good at the end, if you lot have got any questions, any specific things you wanted to ask about how the music happened or the production or the techniques or the stories or anything you want to ask. We can have those kinds of questions when we finish chatting. But definitely feel free to store up questions, find out what you want to find out and make the most of the time. So I think it might be nice to start with a very obvious question, which I’m sure is one you might have answered, but I’m sure people want to know: What was the response from Kling Klang or was there any response at all to the Señor Coconut, to the first Kraftwerk covers album?«

Atom Heart: »Well, in fact when I started working on that record, it wasn’t very clear what it was going to be. It was not an idea for an album, it was just one song, two songs, three songs, suddenly the album was ready. And I always knew that Kling Klang would be very difficult to get in touch with in the first place and very difficult to get a response from. And then at least, very, very difficult to get a permission for anything. So honestly, I just tried to bypass Kling Klang and I just did the record and I sent it to a record company in Japan and they were very interested in releasing it. Through some very obscure channel, Florian Schneider got a copy of the first few songs and it didn’t say anything, it didn’t say Señor Coconut, it just said whatever ‘Latin Kraftwerk’ or something. So they didn’t know where it came from, if it came from Germany or from somewhere else, and at least Florian Schneider really liked it. And then through some very obscure connection, he found out that it was me and he got in touch with a friend of mine and then suddenly I got a phone call from him. Really, [it was] a situation that I never hoped would occur, you know? I just tried to just get it out, maybe sell a couple of copies and I was expecting some letter from a lawyer, a phone call, that’s it. They were even faster than the German record company who released the record. So I got the feedback from them and the record was supposed to be released in the [United] States and in Germany at that moment. And he said they really liked the work I did, which was quite an honour, of course, but they didn’t like my version of Radioactivity and they would really like not to see that released. I tried to convince them that it would be a good idea to release it actually and they got a bit stiff on that. So I spoke to the record companies involved and they took that song off the record and it was released and we got official permission. We have a letter from them saying that it’s valid to do that.«

RBMA: »And this letter is this something that you have stuck on a pin board (laughter)?«

Atom Heart: »(laughing) No, no, in fact I have to admit that Kraftwerk have never been idols to me. In fact, when I started getting interested in music and when I was starting to produce records, they had already passed their peak. I’d say their most influential and their best works have been done [up] until the beginning of the 1980s. And when I started to listen to music consciously, they had this long pause between 1982 – well, there was this 1985 release – when I was into something totally different, so it’s never been important to me really. And that was why, perhaps I could treat them the way I did without having a big complex about it. And Kraftwerk itself came to me, people brought it to me because they were a strong musical prototype in the first place. So I never had a record of [theirs], I had more Perez Prado records than Kraftwerk records, but suddenly I heard the songs coming up automatically and I knew the melodies and I knew the lyrics by memory without ever having listened to them over and over. And that was a good sign, actually. The songs I covered, they select themselves I would say.«

RBMA: »When the record came out people asked whether it was parody or whether it was consciously trying to do something different with the sound. But it sounds to me like it wasn’t either of those things, it sounds to me like the way you made the record wasn’t a response to Kraftwerk themselves, it was just a thing that happened. Is that true or would you say that there was a particular element of parody or salute to the record?«

Atom Heart: »I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t consider being a cynical or ironic person in the first place and I don’t think it’s a good attitude towards music being ironic or cynical. There’s obviously a big portion of humour in it. I would rather call it a good vibe or a humorous vibe, but I don’t think it’s a parody. This thing of being ironic or cynical about music it’s a very German thing and I’m trying not to be cynical, so I can’t really share that.«

RBMA: »You talk about fun and famously on Autobahn, at the beginning of the record, there’s the car that doesn’t start. Was the idea of making it really fun more a farce in the way you made the record instead of anything to do with these ideas of parody or salute. Was fun the most important thing on your mind when you were doing the record?«

Atom Heart: »Making music would be useless if it [wasn’t] about having fun. To make music is having a good time, that’s how I spend all my time, so it wouldn’t make much sense having a bad time doing it. But the main idea of that particular record was I tried to imagine how a Latin band would reinterpret Kraftwerk. There’s a funny thing in Latin America, the people who make traditional music don’t have a background with European electronic music, so there’s not really a link or a person who has a link and the people who make contemporary music in Latin America are not very traditional people. So I tried to imagine a virtual Perez Prado or Tito Puente just taking Kraftwerk songs. So I had to imagine a band, I really imagined the band, the instrumentation of the band and the bandleader, obviously, how would that bandleader direct the band and how would this bandleader cover the topics of Kraftwerk, which are first world topics? And Kraftwerk very much played on the German stereotype singing about the autobahn and computers and stuff, that’s a very German thing to do. So I tried to say how would a guy from Latin America understand that? Somebody who has perhaps never seen an autobahn and what does it mean to them? Since I’m living in South America and I speak the language and I know the environment where people [are] living, I try to simulate that a bit. And of course, that’s a bit humorous actually, if the car doesn’t start. That was my car at that point, which sometimes really didn’t start. I tried to be almost documentary.«

RBMA: »It’s funny really because obviously when you made the record, it wasn’t a live recording it was samplers and synths or whatever, but then that thing, which started off as an imaginary band, started off by you in the studio has become a real band, hasn’t it? And the Señor Coconut live show has become a really popular thing on the circuit. I don’t know if any of you came to see the gig on Saturday night but it’s really popular. Obviously, when people see you play live, they’re really enjoying it. Does it strike you as strange in any way that this band that you imagined that started off as samplers and synths has taken that leap to become a real band?«

Atom Heart: »Well, in the first place, the whole project, as I said before, wasn’t really planned or anything it was born out of a joke and then one morning I woke up and I had the Neon Lights sound in my head as a cha-cha-cha. So it was kind of organic development, you know? I did one song, the second, third and then the album was finished and then I got feedback from record companies. The album was released and I knew that at a certain point the record companies would ask me to promote the record playing live. I knew also, that they would ask me to take my laptop and go on tour. Me, myself and I travelling around the world and I found it a really, really boring perspective. So I said OK, if I have to promote that, I want to do it in a way that’s entertaining to me, something new to me and I had performed on my own for about ten years before the Coconut project, just myself travelling with a computer. There’s a point where it gets repetitive and boring, not so much in the sense of musically repetitive, but the same situations all the way through. I said OK, if the record company’s really into that, I want to have a band and of course they thought I was going totally crazy. It was just too much and it was not a very popular thing to do, not a very expected thing to do because it’s a lot of cost, very difficult organization, it’s basically a rock set up. You have fifteen people on tour in a nightliner, it’s really a lot of difficult planning. But I found it very entertaining and interesting to do, to be on stage with a band, with live musicians coming from a jazz background and it’s just something totally different that I’d never done before. That was the main intention, actually, to have a good time on stage.«

RBMA: »The production on the album’s really specific, did you have any concerns about how that would translate live?«

Atom Heart: »I worked with a musician from Denmark, a bass player, August Engkilde, who was in charge of transcribing the albums which I had programmed. Basically, the Kraftwerk albums I had extracted from my record selection so I had sliced my whole Latin music collection into little pieces and loops and collaged Kraftwerk out of that. There were no notes, no transcripts in those chords, no nothing. I had to find somebody who re-transcribed from the programming. Then he looked for the musicians and he found the musicians and they had to re-interpret what I had programmed. There were some adjustments throughout the last three years where we had to exchange musicians, but everybody had really respected the arrangements I had come up with, so basically they’re playing my arrangements. There are moments in the live performance where they can do whatever they want, there is space for soloing but they’re basically playing my arrangements.«

RBMA: »I guess it would be interesting to talk about Chile itself ‘cause you moved there in ’96, is that right?«

Atom Heart: »1997.«

RBMA: »So what was the story, how did you move from Frankfurt to… where is it in Chile?«

Atom Heart: »Santiago, Chile.«

RBMA: »So how come, what’s the story? What happened?«

Atom Heart: »Well, the story goes is that I was getting pretty bored living in Frankfurt, it had a nice airport. I was living there [for] twenty seven years and at a certain point I just wanted to see something else, I was travelling a lot around the world in the years before, [from] 1994 until I went to Chile. And at the same time I was making music with a good friend of mine, playing live and making records. Dandy Jack, Martin Schopf is his real name, he’s Chilean and he moved to Berlin when he was five. You know in 1974, a Pinochet kind of thing. It never occurred to me he got an invitation to Chile in 1996 and I wasn’t very interested in going there in the first place, I wasn’t interested and then this promoter from Santiago insisted until one day she appeared in Frankfurt just to convince me to go there. So she was flying twenty hours just to say: "Please, you have to come there." So, of course, I [went].«

RBMA: »That’s dedication.«

Atom Heart: »That’s dedication, exactly. A very bad promoter but a very good person (laughter). And, of course, I couldn’t say no and I went there first in March 1996. And when I came back from Chile, we got another invitation for October 1996 and around October there were a lot of things in Frankfurt, which finished for me. Personal cycles I would say. So I was kind of free to go wherever I wanted and he wanted to go back to see his family. His parents had moved back to Chile a long time ago and when we were on the way back in the plane sitting next to lots of Germans we said: "OK, that’s a bit too much. Let’s go there and see what’s going to happen." Just for a year, the plan was to go for one year because obviously making music and having contacts with a lot of people within Europe, I was a bit afraid that being that far away would have a negative influence and that things would shut down or change. So I said: "OK, let’s go there for a year and if everything falls into pieces then I [will] just go back." But then it happened the opposite [way]. Suddenly once I was gone, for some reason I became much more interesting for European labels and it just started to grow.«

RBMA: »What were your first impressions of Santiago? What kind of place is it?«

Atom Heart: »Compared with a lot of other countries within South America, it’s quite European. It’s a big difference to Germany, obviously, but a [lot less] different than a lot of other South American countries. So it’s just wild enough for me not to go crazy and it has stable current, stable electricity, which is very important (laughter). Good weather.«

Participant: »Compared to Germany.«

Atom Heart: »Yes, compared to Germany. But, you know, it’s a good-not –too-kind-of-over-the-top environment for me.«

RBMA: »And what about the musical history of the city, were there things there that were particularly plugged into ideas you had, obsessions you’d developed over the years?«

Atom Heart: »Well, in fact, when I moved there, there weren’t any musical reasons, I wasn’t really interested in getting to know musicians.«

RBMA: »But that could be…?«

Atom Heart: »The scene I met, how can I say it, it’s a very small artistic scene, so it’s very easy to meet everybody instantly from actors to directors to musicians and all of a sudden I was just in the heart of a creative movement. Never really getting too involved, like I tried to be a little bit outside of that scene. But then I‘ve met a lot of people like (pointing out across the room) Argenis, the singer from Señor Coconut, who had just moved to Santiago. A friend of mine brought him over from New York to work on some projects. So all of a sudden I met a lot of very interesting people and with some of those people projects resulted, others not. I [prefer] like trying to invite people in as musicians, I like the producer role, not so much collaborating.«

RBMA: »Is there a modern Santiago sound, a sort of modern Chilean music, which has been worked on at the moment or being produced?«

Atom Heart: »I don’t know, Chile is a very rock and pop [orientated]. I mean, the pop culture is very much rock and it’s been controlled by big North American record companies, like everywhere, I think. So what you can hear in Chile is what you can hear all around the world with some local specifics, I would say. But musically, I don’t think it’s very interesting, which is good. I feel a little bit like I’m on an island, there’s the mountains on one side, the ocean on the other. There’s not much coming or going there, it feels very isolated and on my own and... (pointing) There’s a question.«

RBMA: »Maybe we should wait till the end, store up the questions until the end? Do you want to do it now?«

Atom Heart: »Are we going to wait for the questions?«

RBMA: »Maybe if we wait for the rest of them and do them at the end.«

Participant: »I would like to know about your musical background? Are you able to play a live instrument?«

Atom Heart: »I started as a drummer, I started playing drums for some years, but got really bored of not being able to make an entire song with a drum kit. So I sold the drum kit and bought a drummachine and from the drummachine, four track recorders, synthesizers and started off from there. But I’m coming from - I think my musical approach is a percussive approach.«

Participant: »Did you study theory?«

Atom Heart: »No, not theory.«

RBMA: »One of the things I think would be interesting to pull out is the role that Latin music has had in your music throughout. Because obviously with Señor Coconut you hit a certain peak or gone out to more people that with other stuff, but it seems to me that some of the stuff you’d put out on your Rather Interesting label was already very much starting to mine that area. Is this something that you’d say was true or it might be very interesting to hear from your point of view, how important or not Latin music has been to the way your music has developed?«

Atom Heart: »Well, I was living in Costa Rica for half a year back in 1992 and that was actually the moment I got to know Latin music first and got to know the context it was perceived in. There in Costa Rica and from that moment on I was investigating a lot, listening to music, buying records, trying to absorb it basically.«

RBMA: »What kind of records were you buying?«

Atom Heart: »I’m a very bad name dropper.«

RBMA: »Oh, that’s OK, we’ll forget about that, just carry on.«

Atom Heart: »It can be really anything, bizarre no-name stuff you find in the flea market, stuff like that. And from that moment on in 1992, I tried to incorporate what I would call the Latin music language and the Latin music code into what I was doing, which was a very, very different thing. Coming from tracks and then there’s Latin music, which is somewhere between songs and improvisation. And at some point it has track-oriented structures, so I tried to just listen to it and absorb it and this accumulated I would say into the Señor Coconut idea just before I moved to Chile in 1996. That was like the moment when I had the feeling that it was working and that’s why I gave it a name. And all the years before there were Latin fragments popping up in there in various records.«

RBMA: »I know you’ve got the Replicant Rumba album with you here, maybe we should have a listen to that and you can tell us a bit about this period of your music, perhaps how it plugged into Coconut.«

Atom Heart: »Yes, we need to open that.«

RBMA: »Are we ready to go? Is this going to work?«

Atom Heart: »Yes. Number seven maybe.«

(music: Midisport - Florianopoly)

Participant: »Compliments for mastering the Dalai Lama.«

Atom Heart: »What about it, sorry I didn’t get it?«

Participant: »That voice, that was the Dalai Lama, wasn’t it?«

Atom Heart: »No, no (laughter).«

RBMA: »Maybe you can tell us what the story was, what’s the name of the track, when did it come out?«

Atom Heart: »Well, that actually was released after Señor Coconut. It was an album I released on my label, Rather Interesting, and it was called 14 Footballers In Milk Chocolate. And it was just a take on Brazilian music, which I chopped up, basically. Just like taking pieces of Latin music, I [also] like Brazilian music, and I just sliced it into little pieces and re-organized it. So it sounds a bit like something you know, but you don’t know why.«

RBMA: »Is that very much your kind of working style, collage, so you can sample and recreate collages from pieces that weren’t meant to be like that?«

Atom Heart: »Sometimes, sometimes. On this record, yeah it was like that.«

RBMA: »And what kind of equipment would you use to make that happen?«

Atom Heart: »Right now, I’m only using Pro Tools. I’ve [been] using the system for three years, just a computer, a Powerbook and that’s it.«

RBMA: »And if you were recommending something to use to someone that didn’t have the resources to use Pro Tools, what would you be suggesting?«

Atom Heart: »I really can’t. To me equipment is a really tactile experience. There’s new software or whenever people are recommending software you turn on the machine, you load the program, it does something to you or it doesn’t. In the case of Logic, for example, and (shrugging) it didn’t. I turned it on and I was like: "No!" It’s a very instant thing, it either works or it doesn’t. And I really can’t recommend because the thing about hardware or software is it’s an extension of somebody’s thinking.«

RBMA: »Thank you.«

Atom Heart: »Yes, Logic. It’s called Logic, I mean there must have been a logical person behind that. That’s the thing. I think music isn’t logical at all, so I think to me, the name Logic was already not a good sign, you know? And the whole structure is very logical, if you’re a very logical person, if you’re very into that kind of organizing, music and arrangement and whatever, then it may be fine with you. It’s a very intuitive thing in the end, so I really can’t recommend [it].«

RBMA: »How do you find when you work with other people because some of the other people, Bill Laswell, Pete Namlook, Tetsuo...?«

Atom Heart: »Inoue.«

RBMA: »Inoue, don’t know if that’s correct pronunciation there. Obviously, they’d have their own working practices and preferred pieces of equipment. Say, for example Bill Laswell, how does that work when you’ve worked with him?«

Atom Heart: »Uhh, let’s talk about somebody else (laughter).«

Participant: »Can I ask a quick question? I’m just curious, you were saying you were not much into collaborating, you prefer to work as a producer. But you’ve worked with Burnt Friedman as a collaborator and just wondering how that relationship came about because you’ve released some stuff and how you guys work together?«

Atom Heart: »Normally, when collaborating with a person, there’s never the plan to collaborate in the first place. It’s not like I get a call or a letter with someone and we say: "Let’s collaborate." It’s more like, for example with Burnt Friedman, I met him on vacation in Australia. Throughout two years he was escaping European winter and that was the same thing I was doing. So we accidentally met in Melbourne at the beach and we talked about philosophy for a couple of hours, and it was like a repetitive ongoing philosophical discourse for a very long time, until once he was on vacation in New Zealand, I think, and Chile’s just around the corner, so he said: "Yeah, I’m just [going to] take a plane and come visit you." And since he came with his equipment, we just said let’s see what’s going on. And we had spoken so much and there was a vibe going on and a connection. Normally collaborating is about that, it’s very much like a friendship, you have a vibe with someone or you don’t. And normally – and it’s a very Japanese sort of thing meeting people and cooking together or going to a restaurant - and if you end up making music that’s OK, and if it doesn’t, then it [simply] doesn’t happen. So that’s why [I’m] not collaborating very much ‘cause there’s not many people I have a connection with.«


RBMA: »Obviously, you’ve had a long history of putting records out. Maybe we can take it right back to the beginning, to the first releases. What were the first things you put out and how did they happen?«

Atom Heart: »It happened because of a friend of mine at school. I was making a tape label releasing cassettes back in 1985 until 1988.«

RBMA: »How old were you then?«

Atom Heart: »Good question… erm, eighteen, twenty, something like that. We were just putting out cassettes of our music and other people’s music and it was at school, the last three years of school, and I had a couple of demos. I was just working at home on 4-track cassette recorders and a friend of mine said: "Yeah, that’s good stuff. I will find a record label and a studio to record it." And I didn’t believe it, I thought, ‘OK, if you want to do it, then just do it’, but I didn’t think it would work. And he actually found a label and a studio and we recorded without any money the one album for almost two years. Only on the weekends at night and mixing when there was no one in the studio. He found a record company in Frankfurt, and actually in Frankfurt in the beginning of the 1990s there was a lot of stuff going on, like techno before it was called techno, was quite big. A lot of clubs, a lot of DJs, a lot of little labels coming out so [straight out of school] I was just exposed to that tornado. So you get a lot of offers from people, little private labels going on and I released one album and a 12” here and another 12” and it was a very automatic process I would say. And then, suddenly looking back three years later, I thought, ‘Oh, well, seems like I am a musician, seems like that’s what I’m going to do.’ And I stopped going to university and all of that.«

RBMA: »How do you think things have changed because obviously you started releasing records at a very specific point for electronic music? Techno, electro and house music in the early 1990s had [come to] a massive point where they were reaching out to loads and loads of people. It seemed like every week more people were getting into dance music and going to clubs, learning how to DJ and whatever. When you think about it now and you look at that area of music, what do you think have been most obvious changes to you?«

Atom Heart: »To me the most obvious change is that things have been defined, throughout the last ten years things have been defined. When I started releasing or making music there have been very little definitions, like I said the word techno, for example, didn’t even exist. There were a lot of people making dance music, maybe then it was called acid or house or acid house, techno house. A lot of people gave it different names and it was a very ambiguous movement altogether. That was actually the thing I found most interesting, to work with a lot of people, who had a certain interest in a certain sound. When [they were] making music, it was not about making music in X style, not about: ‘I’m a such and such DJ. Let’s make music and let’s see if people will dance to it if we bring the vinyl to the club.' So that was very exciting back then around 1993 and I had the feeling – that’s why I founded my label in 1994 – because around 1993, techno almost had a classification and it almost went overground in 1994 and I had the feeling years before that that this was the end of what I found interesting. So right now, when you start a label, you have to talk to the distributors, the promoters, and the press [comes up with] so many classifications. When you just say: "I’m a musician," that’s not enough. You have to say: "I’m that type of musician," so that they can classify you. And I think that as soon as a classification comes up, I think a piece of art has died in its development. That I think is the biggest difference I see.«

RBMA: »I’d guess that maybe one of the differences would be – you said that in the beginning that there were all these labels, all these outlets for you to put the music out. Would you say that there’s a different opportunity for people now? Do you think, if you’re a young guy and you’re making techno now and you wanted to put the records out, do you think you’ve got the same kind of environment?«

Atom Heart: »No, definitely not, no. A lot of people, who started back then making a record label had no idea about – even distributors or promoters – had no idea at all what they were going to do. It was just people loving music and then putting the record out. You never got money from them, you never got a statement from them. They just disappeared or overdosed or something like that. It was all very unprofessional, very unprofessional. And I think this has changed also. Nowadays there’s a way to operate a label of a certain size. In the past at the end of the 1980s there was only big indie labels and the majors, there was no small independent techno labels, so there was no knowledge about how to operate [them]. And this knowledge exists nowadays and there are channels for small promoters and distributors and so on so you can rely on certain paths which are there now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but at least people are a bit more professional these days.«

RBMA: »I guess you said that people have learnt how to – I know some of you have got your own labels – people have learnt how to have their own labels, but do it properly you know DIY, people are starting, they keep it quite small. There’s kind of awareness of what a record label is and how you’re supposed to behave and what you’re supposed to do for it. One of the labels you released a lot of stuff through was Pod. Was that one of the labels that you put most of your stuff out through or was there another label that was most important to your early stuff?«

Atom Heart: »Well, actually the guy who did Pod records was the guy who convinced me to produce my first tape on CD. He was going to school with me so he didn’t have much of an idea. When we left school he didn’t have much of an idea in terms of professionalism, it was all very improvised the stuff he did and the stuff we did together. There was no knowledge about how to sell a record or how to promote a record. So it was very interesting in the sense that there was a good energy about it all, very motivated and enthusiastic energy, but it was not professional at all.«

Participant: »Was it all smooth sailing or did you have a couple of bumpy?«

Atom Heart: »It was all very bumpy. I would say the first five years were very bumpy and I didn’t even make enough money the first five, six, seven years. It all started with my label. When I released my own records and I had more control over what’s really happening with the music and control over obviously the cash flow, which is maybe a bit boring to talk about. In the long term you have to think about it’s nice to make music with friends and people who are [simpathic], but maybe it’s not enough.«

Participant: »What about distribution?«

Atom Heart: »The thing is that the artist almost always complains about the label, and the label always complains about the distributor, the distributor complains about the shop and the shop complains about the consumer. That’s like the chain of responsibilities we have.«

Participant: »Maybe the consumer complains about the musician?«

Atom Heart: »(laughing) And the consumer complains about the musician maybe, yeah. So, distribution is a difficult topic but labels are a very difficult topic, too. I mean, for a musician and I myself as a musician, I don’t operate my label myself, I just do the fun part, which is music and artwork. There is no boss, we’re like two people and the other guy is doing the boring stuff (laughter). He’s selling the records and collecting the money and stuff like that. And I very much trust him on what he’s doing and he trusts me on what I’m doing musically.«

Participant: »Is your label based in Chile?«

Atom Heart: »No, my label’s based in Germany. We do limited editions; it’s a very untypical label setup we have. We do limited editions and sell them off very quickly, it’s not a very traditional label operation.«

RBMA: »Would you say that cash flow and having to maximise what you had, had some bearing on the fact that you have so many different aliases recorded under so many different names? Was that one of the reasons why you ended up using so many different artist titles?«

Atom Heart: »In the first couple of years the reason why I switched names was, like I said before, it was very much like a major label setup from the distribution to the contracts they gave you. There was some very small new labels coming up [and] they all thought like small major labels, so they gave you a contract, which was based upon a major label contract but just shrunk down to their needs. But it contained the same clauses as major label contracts. So everybody wanted to have you exclusively, like this old artist exclusive deal, which didn’t make any sense if somebody’s giving you 200€, how can you sign yourself exclusively? So this was the problem occurring at that moment and, of course, contracts had to be changed and I had to invent a system of making myself work in that environment. And I said: "OK, you can get that record but you can’t get me exclusively." And after a while labels got a bit bothered about the fact that I released five records in one week under the same name. And they said: "You can’t do that!" And I said: "OK, maybe you’ve got a point so let’s just use different names."«

(laughter)

Participant: »That was your clause in small print.«

Atom Heart: »Exactly. So that was the initial moment. I just selected different names to be able to record a lot of stuff.«

RBMA: »And do you have like a random name generator in your front room?«

Atom Heart: »No, but I’m collecting names all the time.«

Participant: »What’s your funniest name?«

Atom Heart: »Funniest? The Opposite Sex Always Sucks (laughter).«

Participant: »That’s one name?«

Atom Heart: »Yeah, that’s one name. So coming back to the name thing, in the first years, it was just a very practical thing to do and suddenly I realised it enabled me to remain productive, since I connected a name to a certain character or a certain musical idea. And when I wasn’t able to create under that idea, I could simply switch to another idea to another album, to another name. And after five years I realised that this method had become so much a part of me that in fact it enabled me to remain creative. Because sometimes there’s an idea that you have to follow and one day you wake up and you can’t focus on that.«

RBMA: »So the alias became very much a part of your creative process? That’s really interesting ‘cause you can kind of imagine how that might happen. You talk a lot about imaginary things. I read some press article where you said you had to fire your imaginary secretary because she was getting on your nerves.«

Atom Heart: »I invented the secretary because sometimes it was necessary to write nasty mails to people and it’s not good when artists write nasty mails. So it’s always good to have somebody in between, so I’d invent a secretary.«

RBMA: »The first time I ran a small event a friend said to me: “The first thing you have to do is get an imaginary person who can answer all the emails you don’t want to answer”.«

Atom Heart: »Exactly.«

Participant: »Just on the subject of aliases, you did this project called LB, which was covers of pop songs and I’m just wondering if there’s anymore coming or if LB will make his own music as well?«

Atom Heart: »No, no. This project was terminated with this last record, I would say.«

RBMA: »That whole thing about cover songs is something you deal with a lot with The Fiesta Songs, which are covers of Smoke On The Water, Riders On The Storm, Smooth Operator, Beat It, among others, as well as some of your own, so it’s like cover versions and your own stuff.«

Atom Heart: »I was covering myself (laughter).«

RBMA: »But it was still original, the imaginary element here is still original. Although as a construct, I can see that it worked. One of the questions we were asking people earlier, when we were trying to find out about them, was what’s your worst cover version and some people were like: "I hate all cover versions," and some people were like: "Oh, I really like cover versions." Do you naturally feel quite positive about the cover version as an entity?«

Atom Heart: »I definitely do, yes. The thing is, I’m constantly listening to music, I think everybody is [surrounded by] music, wherever you go: airports, supermarkets. I have a very good supermarket in Chile where they play very, very bizarre music. So I’m shopping and suddenly I hear very strange songs, sometimes very strange versions. Like I said, sometimes the songs select themselves. So, I think this is a good song and then, if the song reappears a couple of years or a couple of months or weeks later, it’s a good sign that this song has some potential. And I very much like that process when a song appears in my head in a different shape, it’s pretty much about that.«

RBMA: »I think the cover version has a pretty notable history in countries that didn’t have access or the money to make their own stuff. Like Jamaica, you know the roots of rocksteady were cover versions of American soul records because they couldn’t afford the records or they couldn’t get them and maybe you have a similar thing in countries, where they don’t have the resources to do things themselves. They act like a springboard for people to get into music, to start doing things, getting some experience and then getting to make their own music. Does that make sense to you, would you agree with that?«

Atom Heart: »Well, I think that there’s the typical thing of rock bands playing cover versions before they make their own rock songs. But to me it’s more like my approach with cover versions comes more from that Latin bandleader background. In the beginning of pop music, there existed only bands and orchestras and there was a bandleader and the only thing a band did was interpret existing songs. There was the composer, the writer, the publisher, the label, the bandleader, the arranger, the musician. It was a totally different setup compared to today. Today we have one person doing everything. But back then it was very defined, there was an arranger and [he] was arranging a song that was given to him. It could have been a classic or a new song, it could have been contemporary or non-contemporary. And my inspiration comes from very much from that period, from that era. With Señor Coconut, I’m trying to take that role of the arranger, trying to imagine the orchestra sitting in front of me with instruments and try to imagine how a classical arranger would arrange that piece having that amount of instruments.«

RBMA: »Do you think the new producers got this whole array of questions in front of them like: ‘What format do I use? What equipment do I use? What kind of music am I going to make?' Do you think the question of arrangement should be as useful to have as an umbrella over everything you’re doing?«

Atom Heart: »I don’t think the arrangement topic should be of interest in the first couple of years. I think that maybe it’s too complex a topic to deal with in the first two years. At least in my case it was like that, I wasn’t really aware of the difference between a track and a song, for example. It was just being inspired, having equipment and just letting it out. After a while you’ve saturated that path and you think, ‘OK, there has to be something more’, and then you start getting into sound design or maybe writing lyrics or whatever and then at a certain point you’re getting into the structures and obviously into arrangement. But [I have the feeling] maybe that’s coming a bit later. It’s quite difficult to give advice here.«

RBMA: »If you were going to pass on a top tip for people when they’re at the beginning of their careers at making music, what do you think is the most important thing to bear in mind right at the beginning in the first couple of years of actually making music?«

Atom Heart: »Making or releasing?«

RBMA: »Making.«

Atom Heart: »To listen to your inner voice, I think. Making music is a very, very intuitive kind of thing and I think the thing that the biggest problem is when people start to talk about music and making music and the very first thing they’re doing is classifying what they’re going to do. I think that’s a big mistake. As I said before, classifying yourself: "I’m a drum 'n' bass musician" – how can you have a statement like that? It’s ridiculous. In the first place, I think you should absorb music and things you like and then just listen to your inner voice and then let it out without really thinking about classifying it. You know like: "If I make that kind of music, will I be able to find a record label?" Or: "If I don’t do it this way, maybe it will be more successful." Stuff like that. I think it’s very important in the first place to make the music for yourself and not for the audience. That sounds a bit arrogant, but that’s really the only way to make something that satisfies you and long term, I think, it will satisfy anybody who’s listening to it.«

RBMA: »I think we should probably go out and have some questions around here, if anyone’s got anything they want to ask. Yeah, over here.«

Participant: »You mentioned sometimes that you enjoy sometimes taking the arrangers part. Have you already tried mixing in your music - I suppose that it’s played mostly by electronic devices – with live instruments and sometimes even a small combo, and actually writing an arrangement for those instruments?«

Atom Heart: »Yes and no. I have produced a couple of (raises two fingers indicating quote/unquote) rock bands. Let’s call them rock bands and they played on top of programming I did, or on top of loops I did, and we wrote arrangements for that purpose. We had the idea for the song ready, mentally ready not written down or anything. I gave certain tasks to certain musicians. I said to the guitarist: "You’ll play this and that, the drummer will play this and that." But then afterwards, once it’s on a hard drive, it’s always subject to manipulation. Usually, I never leave the notes where they have been played, it’s all being processed later on.«

RBMA: »Great, thank you. Anybody else? We’ve got a question over here.«

Participant: »You’ve made many cover versions of The Doors and other really big names, weren’t you afraid that someone wouldn’t allow you to release these? How did you get these releases anyway?«

Atom Heart: »The only artist I was a bit afraid of really was Kraftwerk because they’re really apprehensive about their work. Usually other artists such as The Doors or…«

(unintelligible interruption from participant)

Atom Heart: »To begin with, when you do a cover version, as long as you don’t change arrangement and lyrics, you don’t need a permission from anybody, at least not in Germany. So as long as you stick with the original track - you know the melody, the arrangement, the vocals, the lyrics - everything is pretty safe, I would say. Somebody has to be really, really, really angry about what you did in order to stop you in the first place, so [making a cover version] is not a problematic topic. But then, I did the Spanish translation for Smoke On The Water, which obviously was a bit funny to do that, and I was a bit afraid that the publisher would reject the translation because it twisted the song quite a lot. I mean, we tried to translate it as much as possible, but singing that song in Spanish was a bit funny.«

RBMA: »If you had to translate your translation back again from the Spanish back into English, what would it be saying?«

Atom Heart: »It would say the same, actually, but the funny thing is that, if you speak Spanish and you hear that cha-cha-cha, Smoke On The Water, cha-cha-cha sung in Spanish, it’s difficult for someone who doesn’t speak Spanish to understand that it’s funny, which is good! So I did the translation and the recording without any permission from the Deep Purple publishing and then I gave it to the record company saying that there may be a problem with that, so maybe they should check with the publisher. So they sent the translation to the Deep Purple publisher and allegedly they listened to it and found it good. But, normally this bureaucratic process, when you do a cover version, doesn’t have to be done, only if you really alter the original song.«

Participant: »And is there something sacred that you wouldn’t touch ever?«

Atom Heart: »I wouldn’t say sacred, but there are definitely songs which I think are very, very well done so I don’t see a perspective to [cover them]. Well, you definitely can’t do them better, maybe you could destroy them or something. For example Something from George Harrison would be a song I wouldn’t want to touch because you could destroy it or something, but what’s the point? There are definitely a lot of good pop songs that I couldn’t touch. I wouldn’t say they’re sacred, but they’re just too good, I think.«

RBMA: »Great, have we got any more questions?«

Participant: »We heard out of your Señor Coconut name some productions that are mainly Latin orientated in a way, they have the strong Latin feel to them. What could be expected - you said something about strong intuition, doing what you feel like and all of that, but I guess the main difference is the fact that you left Germany on this trip and met all these amazing musicians. I’m not sure, but you said something like you were not particularly affected by Latin instruments in Chile, but you ended up doing some Latin versions of well-known tracks. So could it be anything from there on for you as a producer?«

Atom Heart: »You mean any musical style? Yes, definitely. With Latin music I have the feeling that I [really] understand what it is about. How Latin music works and speaking Spanish, understanding the language and the people, most of the cultural surroundings, I feel more confident maybe touching Latin American music than Russian folk or something. But musically, style-wise, I don’t see any incompatibilities or restrictions on my side. So it’s a very intuitive thing as I said before. You listen to something and it’s triggering something and if the idea’s strong enough, then I do it. In the case of Señor Coconut - since it became the most popular of works that [I’ve done] - all the other little things I’ve done around the same time haven’t been seen. So it’s a [slightly] one-dimensional view that people have of my work, but there’s been a lot of non-Latin…«

Participant: »I would take it as a strong identity, not as a one-dimensional.«

Atom Heart: »Pardon?«

Participant: »I think it’s like a strong identity, not one-dimensional. You have released many things as you say, you’re known for the Latin thing.«

Atom Heart: »Yeah, for me Latin music doesn’t have to reflect in using a cowbell, for example. There can be Latin music in a very strange, abstract techno track, it’s not classified as Latin or however you want to classify it, but listening [to a lot] of Latin music gives you a certain musical vocabulary of rhythms, of how notes are placed, of how structures are broken or switched. At a certain point I think in my vocabulary it’s not Latin anymore, it’s just become a normal part of my musical vocabulary.«

RBMA: »Great, thank you. Do we have any more or shall we consider this the definitive?«

Participant: »I’m not familiar with your work, but I just wondered about your creative process. The track that you played before, did you start out making the drums one day, or did you pick out the vocal sample first and then decide to put drums behind it? Or did you decide to make the keys rhythm first or do you always start with the drums?«

Atom Heart: »I don’t remember very much...«

Participant: »Late night, huh?«

Atom Heart: »No, no… I think I started selecting a loop I liked from a bossa nova record and then I just cut it up and put it back together the wrong way round and from there a groove resulted and then I programmed the bassline and the stuff, which you thought was the Dalai Lama, was a little formant vocoder box.«

Participant: »So generally, build a groove first and then look for bits to go on top of it?«

Atom Heart: »In the case of this song, yeah.«

Participant: »You don’t have a strict process?«

Atom Heart: »No, I don’t have a strict process. Sometimes I wake up at night and I have a sentence in my mind and I record the sentence, a word or something like that. And this word has a certain rhythm and then the next day I put harmonies on top and then the beat and maybe in the very end the first idea I had is not there anymore so it’s a very long, ongoing process of putting stuff on top and taking stuff out.«

Participant: »Whatever fits with previous stuff that you’d maybe done two weeks ago or whatever.«

Atom Heart: »Exactly, yeah.«

RBMA: »OK, so Uwe, thank you very much.«

(applause)