A rare and oddly beautiful form of schizophrenia, known among the medical community as hypotensivelectroglitchbiodisintegration, has thankfully lessened its grip on the alias-almost-too-friendly German composer/producer Uwe Schmidt. Deferring to Wikipedia, Schmidt has apparently assumed more than 60 monikers over his roughly two-decade long musical career, but lately, and much to the dismay of those who gigglingly enjoyed his limited work as Candy Ballsak, he’s focused on releasing material through two names in particular: the explicitly latin-themed Señor Coconut, and Atom™, whose 2009 album Liedgut brought some welcome romanticism to the Chemnitz-based Raster-Noton label.
The R-N release of Liedgut’s sequel, Winterreise, was released just last year, and already, Atom™ has a new LP in the works, this time with some very special (is there any other kind?) guest contributions.
HD will be released on March 18, and it features aural appearances from Raster-Noton co-founder Alva Noto a.k.a. Carsten Nicolai, Chilean singer Jorge Gonzales, and Warp-resident Jamie Lidell, who offers vocals on the track, “I Love U.” The album itself consists of entirely new tracks, and basically new tracks — the latter of which refers to re-workings of recordings that date back to 2005. I’ll leave you with Schmidt’s own words regarding the album, and below that, listen to three HD teaser clips.
The first recordings for HD were made in 2005. Back then the album still carried another title which was Hard Disc Rock… The initial selection of songs for Hard Disc Rock was of course a very different one, and while the years passed by most of those songs which did not continue to please, were one by one replaced by newer compositions (in fact the track “Stop (Imperialist Pop)”, which entered the album around 2009, does contain a fragment of an Atom track from 1998 called “Hard Disc Rock (don’t stop)”.) All of the ‘early’ tracks for the later re-entitled HD album necessarily were subject to profound changes in music and words, and I can say that by the time around 2012 Hard Disc Rock had completely transformed into something else.
HD tracklisting:
01. Pop HD
02. Strom
03. I Love U
04. The Sound of Decay
05. Empty
06. Riding the Void
07. Stop (Imperialist Pop)
08. My Generation
09. Ich bin meine Maschine
• Atom™: http://www.atom-tm.com
• Raster-Noton: http://www.raster-noton.net
More about: Atom™
