Monday, December 1, 2008

Flanger part 2, Beige, Atom TM

Let me get the Beige out of the way. This CD actually gives me a headache, infallibly. Vibrato bass, tight drums, and horn stabs. Head ache. Every time. I should sell it.

Back to Flanger then.
Templates is an amazing album, and Flanger haven't released anything as stunning since, but that's ok, as they have released 3 solid albums.
Midnight Sound is more loungey than Templates, with some fantastic organ grooves - generally the extreme DSP manoeuvres are much more carefully hidden in the music and take some close attention to find. Something to put on at a cocktail party with the secret feeling that you've perpetrated some extreme electronica on guests.
Inner/Outer Space - Latin precussion and 70s fusion/funk moves rule this CD. I don't think I've given it quite enough attention, there are some parts that sound like the 70s funk I don't like, but that's just me.
Spirituals - 20s/30s ragtime dixieland complete with the Pike brothers from Oz providing guitar and vocals. Think New Orleans brass blow out, Django, and jazz hands. This one is great, another record to perpetrate on people. You can also sing along.

Alright: Here it is then
I own a lot of Atom Heart (aka Uwe Schmidt, Atom TM, Atom, Senor Coconut, Roger Tubesound, Mono TM etc etc).
Rather than do an album by album breakdown, I will point out the high water marks in his vast oeuvre.
Early Atom TM is ambient. He did stuff w/ Pete Namlook, and this has its followers to be sure. Dots is a nice album, but it was the Flowerhead album he did w/ Tetsuo Inoue that suddenly grabbed me.
Flextone is part of the acid/house thing he was doing. Nice enough, but not essential.
Machine Paisley, Brown, Silversound 60 - these are the start of the Atom Heart sound as I think of it. They're a bit rough around the edges, but have some great stuff going on. You can see the seeds for the latin excursions he was going to go on. Of the three, Machine Paisley is perhaps the weakest.
MonoTM, Pentatonic Surprise - Here we go - the fusion of sample mastery, latin rhythms, acid, dub, what-have-you is really clear on these two. MonoTM is dub/electro-ish, and Pentatonic Surprise is more jazz-sample based, but both share common ground.
HAT is a fun little side project he did.
Erik Satin, Los Samplers - Pretty god-damned awesome. A short description is hard...glitch, latin forms, Esquivel, mashed up easy listening...amazing stuff.
Dropshadow Disease is the slightly more serious version of this idea, if silliness is not 100% your thing, that's the one to track down if you want a slice of the Atom pie. Either that or the first Senor Coconut album, which is not covers, it's more obviously latin than other albums Uwe put out around the same time.
MIDI Sport is in the same vein as Erik Satin or Los Samplers, chocolate football themes.
BDP is the extreme clicks and cuts take on the stuff Atom had been working with. Serious glitch going on here, but glitch (cha cha cha), and it's not obnoxious because you know he did all of these edits by hand.
Los Negritos - Hardcore Merengue. Literally. 45 minutes, 27 songs or so, I don't think it drops below 180bpm the whole time.
Atom TM - iMix is a great, silly pop EP, with fantastic production, particularly the opening track. Son Of A Glitch, the album is frustrating, because it contains too many unfinished sketches.

And now we're getting album after album of Senor Coconut covers. It's sort of good, but it's also a fair bit less amazing than Atom's past work. I suppose it's only fair, he's been labouring on this amazing body of work and getting no attention for years and years. It's probably nice to get paid.

No comments: