In The Studio: Señor Coconut
February 4 2009 * Text by Cameron Macdonald



German-Chilean techno vet Uwe Schmidt surprised many a decade ago when he stepped into the spotlight shaking his maracas as Señor Coconut. On
Coconut's debut 2000 album, El Baile Alemán, he revised German electro-pop godfathers Kraftwerk as a very un-robotic Latin dance band, stitching
together samples of Latin dance records to unleash merengue, cumbia, and cha-cha-cha covers of "Trans Europe Express," "Autobahn," and other
classics. The Señor is back with his second album, Around the World, on which he leads live musicians through rumba and mambo renditions of tunes by
Daft Punk, Prince, and Eurythmics. XLR8R spoke to the Santiago resident about the Coconut touch.


XLR8R: I've read that your studio motto is "decoration instead of gear."
Uwe Schmidt: [Laughs] During the last 20 years of making music, I've always
found that it's more important for me to focus on musical ideas. The tools are important, of course; it's like any craft or art, and with the tools you build whatever you build. I wanted to reduce [my set-up] to a very specific tool and try to solve as much as possible with that tool. The pressure or
limitation that comes from it, I've always found very inspiring. It's always been a great source of inspiration to have almost no instruments or no tools at all, just one very powerful main tool. So, maybe it was like seven years ago when machines got smaller and smaller and more powerful, all of sudden I was sitting in a very big, empty room with just a pair of speakers. I had the idea of just making the [room] more comfortable-instead of buying more
equipment, I'd buy more decorations.



What piece of studio gear is essential for the Señor Coconut sound?

Mainly Pro Tools. That's the biggest portion of the sound. Also, I have reduced to using a set of two or three plug-ins and it's nothing fancy either. It's very good sound for a digital environment. I basically mixed
the entire album with three plug-ins. The idea was to achieve a good recording in the studio so the mix wouldn't need [to be] drastic or complicated. It's like in the past, a little bit. I'm very impressed by the recordings from the '50s and even before, where [studio] technology was really reduced... The idea was to not interfere too much with the recording; just obtain a good recording and try to treat the material as little as possible. It's more about volume and very little frequency adjustment, and that was basically it.


When it comes to recording Latin instruments, were there any production techniques that you learned from studying Latin records or local musicians in Santiago?We actually recorded German musicians in Cologne, so the recording process is very untypical; it's not the way that one would expect it to be as a listener. You'd think, "Ah, it's a band recording with Latinos playing or session musicians playing together." It's the opposite. After I laid out the basic idea of the songs, we wrote the scores and arrangements. And so we had sheets of notes and scores. Then we brought in one musician and just recorded notes. We never recorded the whole horn section and the bass player never played with the percussion player. They all played on top of a template I built. Afterwards, when I'm back with my material in my studio in Santiago, I cut it up and bring it into one template or have it sound as if they had really played together. I can say that I have really touched manually every single note on this album-every hit, every note. Everything which was played, I have at some stage moved or replaced or copied and pasted it to something else.


Many of the Señor Coconut recordings gave me the impression they were recorded live in a large music hall since there's a bit of an echo in the sounds.
It's not at all [laughs]. It's really the opposite. It's like slices and layers of musicians, some of them not knowing each other. Even sometimes the bass player is playing a different groove than the percussion player because they're playing on a different template. So, very often, the whole recording sounds quite not together. To me, making music is a big puzzle or a patchwork of all kinds of elements, only audio files. That's the fun part.


MP3: "Around the World"

iTunes Store - Around the World with Senor Coconut



amazon.com - Around the World with Senor Coconut



i-Tunes - El Baile Aleman



amazon.com - El Baile Aleman

By Zachary Wallmark | Fabrikalink.com
As a great music critic once put it, "pop eats itself." Nowhere is this dictum as playfully and wantonly embodied as in "Around the World," by electronic musician Señor Coconut. Our shape-shifting DJ (a.k.a. Atom) has resurfaced under yet another alias to produce a quirky, delightful collection of international pop covers. His self-described style, "electrolatino," is an idiosyncratic mixture of cha-cha, mambo, merengue, and various other assorted Latin American genres fused with a healthy dose of beat science and a generous supporting section of horns and vibraphones (his "Orchestra"). On paper, this seems to be an odd, incoherent, and kitschy concept – covering such hallowed pop ground as "Sweet Dreams" (The Eurythmics) and "Kiss" (Prince) as lounge lizard, irony-drenched mambo tunes should be violating some unwritten law of pop appropriateness. Yet, surprisingly and inexplicably, "Around the World" is a stunning success. In a pop music world where ironic detachment is all too often a vehicle for angst and despair, Señor Coconut shows us just how fun and original kitsch can be.

Outsiders appropriating Latin music is nothing new. Señor Coconut is part of a long line of distinguished Lationophiles, from Dizzy Gillespie's experiments in Afro-Cuban rhythm to Herbie Mann's leisure-suit 60s chic. (If you wanted to go way back, French composer Georges Bizet was dabbling in the exotic textures of Cuban music for his iconic opera "Carmen" in 1875). Where Coconut differs from the above, however, is in his unabashed, brazen disregard for any notion of authenticity. As he points out on his website, mambo itself is a synthetic genre invented by a Cuban exile living in Mexico and writing for the American market. It is therefore a byproduct of multicultural crosscurrents, just like "Around the World." Nothing in pop music is stylistically "pure," and this revelation is flaunted across the fourteen tracks that make up the album.

But don't take "Around the World" as simple empty pastiche. The international covers included here, from the ones mentioned above to 80s German electronica "Da Da Da" and the Antonio Carlos Jobim classic "Corcovado," are immaculately re-imagined here with a deft ear to the arrangements and a keen sense of humor. Don't expect the bluesy, seductive saunter of "Kiss" with a clave and timbales pasted into the mix: all the covers here are complete makeovers of the originals. The concept of the album may be all about carefree amalgamation, but the arrangements themselves are precise and carefully planned. This outing is a rigorous exercise in genre bending without losing sight of the sublime silliness that makes the collection so immensely listenable.

Señor Coconut has accomplished something truly elusive with this record. "Pop eats itself" is a commentary on the unimaginative, derivative nature of most popular music. Coconut has demonstrated here, however, that derivatives can in fact be imaginative. Who'd have thought that the sound of pop eating itself could be so much fun?

http://www.fabrikalink.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=2228&z=3

..>
SEÑOR COCONUT

AROUND THE WORLD

By David Day



GENRE
| MAMBO-TRONIC
VERDICT | GENUS GENIUS
RELEASE | 11.18.style="display:none" gauntlet_tokenizer_reserved=""/>08
LABEL | NACIONAL RECORDS

SENOR-COCONUT. COM ..>Geniuses come in many flavors, but generally they hold their own style amongst the riff-raff. Uwe Schmidt is one such mind, still with his garish mustache and out-of-phase three-piece suit. He is Señor Coconut, but also Atom. As Herr Kokosnuss, he takes famous electronic music and Latinizes it. As a lover of South American style (and long- time resident of Chile), he's recontextualizing his life as he reconstructs the music. Around the World is the next logical step, taking classics like the Daft Punk song of the same name, "Kiss" by Prince and "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics and remaking them in his own image. This isn't kitsch or cliché, but an artist at work. The extent of Schmidt's vision is great, and these rumbas, mambos and cha cha chas would sound right at home in our most authentic Latino nightclubs.
¡Ay, Mami!=

Señor Coconut takes an unusual tour 'Around the World'

A German who makes Latin-infused big-band jazz and techno music? Meet Chile-based Señor Coconut, and it all becomes clearer

By CARY DARLING
cdarling@star-telegram.com

Talk about a globetrotter.

The man who goes by the name of Señor Coconut and calls Santiago, Chile, home is really Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom Heart) from Frankfurt, Germany. But his travels don't stop there. His salsa-splashed, big-band, tiki-lounge, swingin'-bachelor-pad take on American and European pop has turned him into a cult figure across Europe and in Japan, where he plays to enthusiastic crowds. This year alone, he has toured Hungary, Corsica and Turkey.

So it's no wonder his latest album (in stores Tuesday) is called Around the World and features his twist on such global dance-club classics as Around the World by France's Daft Punk, Moskow Diskow by Belgium's Telex and WhiteHorse by Denmark's Laid Back.

This follows on the heels of his 2006 disc, Yellow Fever! (a tribute to the groundbreaking Japanese electronica act Yellow Magic Orchestra), the 2005 Fiesta Songs (covering classic party tracks like Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water), and the 2000 disc that first brought him attention in the U.S., El Baile Alemán (The German Dance),in which he took the pioneering electronic music of his Teutonic homeboys, Kraftwerk, and seasoned it with Latin flavor.

Schmidt's alter ego as the Ricky Ricardo for the techno age was born by accident. He was a producer and DJ and had built something of a reputation on the German industrial/electronica scene but, by the late '90s, he found it stifling.

"I was tired on a personal and mental level of living in Frankfurt," he says by phone from Frankfurt, where he was visiting. "I wanted to be on my own, and I ended up in Chile. It's a bit like an island with an island mentality; especially in the pre-Internet era, you were really cut off."

A new rhythm

Schmidt chose Chile because it was far enough away to qualify as the end of the world; a friend and German musical partner had roots there and had returned to Santiago to live. Schmidt already spoke some Spanish, having studied the language in school and spent time visiting Costa Rica. In fact, it was on that 1993 trip that he first began thinking about incorporating Latin music into what he was doing.

"I found that really inspiring, and I had the feeling my own musical language was a bit underdeveloped," he says. "I had this core of merging Latin American music with the cut-and-paste thinking I had developed."

The breakthrough came at the dawn of the new century with El Baile Alemán. "I had this idea: Find a Latin American cumbia band, play them Kraftwerk, and ask them to reinterpret it. I couldn't find that band in Chile and, for the sake of curiosity, I threw some samples together, made a demo. It started to take shape," he recalls. "People listened to it and started to smile."

Even the reclusive, notoriously hard-to-please and unsmiling members of Kraftwerk liked it, or at least one of them did. "Ralf [Hutter] was not so fond of it, but since Florian [Schneider] liked it, he said, 'OK, we won't make a problem.' "

Novel or novelty?

Although Schmidt, 40, has released non-Latinized dance music as Atom Heart, crafted Señor Coconut originals and created all sorts of remixes for clients (including Japanese video games), he's best known as that guy who takes well-known songs, pops them in the blender and pours out a mojito musical mix. In other words, he's often classified as a novelty, a word he doesn't like.

"Of course, to a certain degree, I was playing with the effect of being novelty," he concedes. "But, especially in the English- and German-speaking countries, they put a certain accent on the novelty topic, more than in other countries, like Spain or Italy. There are certain countries where I have to defend myself much more than in others. Maybe German or British people have a humor which deals with novelty and see it as a kind of irony or sarcasm."

Although he tours the world with his Coconut big band, including singer Louie Austen and a team of 13 to 15 people, he has yet to play the U.S., largely because of the expense. He hopes that's a barrier he can overcome, though he adds, "the travel costs are beyond good and evil."

Still, he has no plans to relocate from his Chilean isolation. "I don't see the point of leaving," he says. "Compared to 10 years ago, it came closer to the rest of the world because of the Internet thing — which is a bit bothering. I enjoy being far away."

". People listened to it and started to smile. . . [I] made a demo . . I had this idea: Find a Latin American cumbia band, play them Kraftwerk, and ask them to reinterpret it. ."

Coming soon on "Nacional Records": "Around the World" and the remastered edition of "El Baile Alemán"!

http://www.nacionalrecords.com/artists/senorcoconut/

Video clip "Da Da Da" featuring Stephan Remmler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBJYpfymTa8

English version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqh9FpIVcnw

Señor Coconut and his Orchestra will go on an extensive "Around the World" tour this year. Next to the fabulous vocalist Argenis Brito, our very special guest, Mr. Louie Austen will perform with the Orchestra on most of the shows.
Check out the "upcoming shows" section for details.