Artist of the Week: Señor Coconut
I first heard about Señor Coconut when his album "El Baile Alemán" was released in 2000 and it featured Kraftwerk covers to a calypso beat. I was hooked. For a long while, I couldn't find much on Señor Coconut other than he was a German DJ that had moved to Chilie. It wasn't until another 1190 DJ told me about his projects under the name 'LB' that I wa able to listen to his older work. I decided to pick Señor Coconut, aka Atom Heart, aka LB, aka Uwe Schmidt, as the artist of the week because his newest album "Yellow Fever!" will be realeased later this week. Happy 4th of July, Culture Clash style.
"German DJ and producer Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom Heart) had released dance music in his homeland under a number of different aliases during the first half of the 1990s. But he'd become bored with the European music scene and in 1996 transferred his base of operations to Chile in order to begin exploring the possibilities of Latin music, which was, he said, "a pretty much undiscovered planet to me. It unveils lots of interesting musical worlds to me." Adopting the ridiculous Señor Coconut moniker, he first cooked up El Gran Baile, a distinctly Latin-flavored groove-a-thon, and did a remix for former Deee-Lite turntablist Towa Tei. Then he began to ponder the possibilities of a German-Latin fusion, and found his material in the unlikeliest of places -- the greatest hits of man-machine band Kraftwerk, best-known for their very inhuman, unemotional approach to music -- the very opposite of Latin passion. The result was El Baile Alemán. Although credited to Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto, it was purely the work of Schmidt and three vocalists, who took the Kraftwerk machine ideal and tipped it on its head, putting in programmed cumbia, merengue, and salsa rhythms to flavor the Teutonic stew. Released as a one-off in 2000, it received a fair amount of critical acclaim in the U.S., more than Schmidt had received for any of his other work. In March 2001, Señor Coconut -- now a real eight-piece band -- was set to undertake a short headlining tour in North America, but visa problems for some of the Chilean musicians forced a cancellation. Two years later, however, the band released Fiesta Songs, which was followed up in 2005 with Coconut FM, a collection of Latin club tunes. Their next album, Yellow Fever, which not only covered songs by Yellow Magic Orchestra but included all three members as well as other guest artists, came out in 2006." - Billboard.com
Video for "Showroom Dummies" on YouTube.com
Video for "Tour de France" on YouTube.com
posted by Steppie @ 12:09 PM
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