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Music

Atom™ on Techno, Clubbing, and Our Planet's Crisis of Creativity

We sat down with the German producer, live-artist, and possible mad scientist, during a recent trip to Colombia.

Only Atom™ (often known as Atom Heart), real name Uwe Schmidt, can get away with sporting a full suit while jamming out on analog gear in front of psychedelic LED visuals. Check out his mind-bending AV live set, or read one of his many interviews from throughout the years and you'll catch a heavy whiff of wacky persona and other-worldly outlook on the universe, all of which blur the lines between his identity as a producer, live-artist, mad scientist, or the whole lot of 'em balled up into one sartorially-minded torrent of techno.

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Born in Germany, now living in Chile (he's lived throughout South America in recent years), Schmidt has enjoyed various milestones through a lengthy career that kicked of in the early 80s, most notably the cultivation of the aciton genre, which melts together acid and reggaeton sounds, as well as his penchant for a multitude of artist aliases, like his famed Señor Coconut project.

Recently our amigos down at the newly minted THUMP office in Bogota, Colombia had the opportunity to talk with Schmidt about how he views the electronic scene, what he thinks of techno (last year he released a jamming 12" on The Bunker New York), and if electronic music in general is still pushing the bar of creativity like he has been doing for multiple decades.

THUMP: Do you think there is still room for innovation in music?
Atom™: I know that in the electronic scene today, there is a kind of depression, and it seems that everything is done, since the past we have generated has become very large. But I'm generally a positive person! I always see the birth of something new and I still see progress—for me that's very inspiring. What do you think of the clubbing scene today?
For the first time in a long time, there are sound systems with sufficiently good quality suitable for playing electronic music. For me this is new, because if you look at the PAs of the 90s, they were terrible—they were rock or disco systems. This has changed a lot in the last ten years and it's a really big step, as you can really hear the music as it was intended from production. It inspires me to play my music in places with better sound.

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Moreover, I think there are some very commercial, boring, almost mechanical events. I think that electronic music is [and should be] sophisticated.

Many consider you to be a benchmark within the glitch and minimal universe. Techno in recent years has taken a rather abstract trend. Do you think this evolution been positive?
I stopped being interested in techno at some point around the mid 1990s, when I was dedicated to other things, like my Señor Coconut project. But only around seven years ago did I go out again into the scene, and for the first time in twenty years, I felt that something interesting was happening in techno.

The progress has been small, but steady, and I started, producing more techno records, playing in more cubs, and incidentally finding that techno has always pursued a single idea. If we look back and compile all the techno tracks that exist in the world, it would almost be a single track—one idea—and that began to fascinate me a lot recently.

Are there still such innovative things happening in house and techno? Something like the acid house revolution?
It's quite difficult to put into words, but whether it's called acid or house, it was more sophisticated. [Since then] it's taken more synthesized forms: the opulent, baroque style of the 1990s, the so-called minimalism of the 2000s. Though I didn't find anything minimalist about that, and I didn't like it at all.

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That's why techno has to regain that force—the dirt and darkness—something that's not limited by the parameters of the 90s. The sudden changes are what attract me now—I got to festivals and listen to other artists and hear many things I like, much more that fifteen years ago.

How would you explain the intention to having more than 20 DJ aliases?
It's very simple. For me the aliases are born as a way to structure certain ideas that I have. They're all parameters that drive your simple sensations. If [the alias] has enough music to make a song or album, at some point I give it a name. They're all very artistic, but somehow also loose. Fifteen years ago, I got bored and stopped using this methodology, so I decided to just use one or two of the names, basically just Atom™.

Do you think having an alias benefits the artist?

It's difficult to define. I saw RBMA's interview of Haruomi Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra), and during his forty-year career he has also had many changes of style—several groups and projects—but especially varied aesthetics, and they asked him the same question. He said what always interested him more is to just enjoy what you are doing.

Being locked into a single idea, style of music, or marketing of a name can get quite claustrophobic, but reinventing yourself can become very difficult. Obviously it is not easy to handle many aliases and different kinds of music—maybe practicality it's not the best option—but as Haruomi said in his interview while brushing a bit with the egocentric, it's yourself who lives your own music, and that for me is primordial.

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One could say that Raster-Noton is your home label, but last year you released a record through NYC's The Bunker. What makes you consider releasing on a new label?
Twenty years ago there were many more labels, and you could easily release music in many cases, without having any contact with the label. They were very cold relationships: someone who you don't know listens to your music, sends you an email or a fax, you sign a contract, and eventually release a record.

It either works or it doesn't, and that's why in the 2000s I began to gain control of my catalog. It was the first step in saying: 'I don't need more labels, I'll do it [myself]. Today when I get offers to work with other labels, I'm normally not interested if I don't know the person.

Do you think the arts in general are living a crisis of creativity?
Yes, I find that the planet itself is a bit on the crisis. I would like to see that what we consider art or music, even what we consider history, would become non repeatable elements of the past, because we are entering another level of consciousness, where the concept of history makes no sense.

Where would creativity come from in art? If we can not be creative with all the current tools at our disposal, I think that would be more of a systemic situation. The exploitation of art to economic interests can also be the cause for this saturation.