17 Facts About Uwe Schmidt

Uwe Schmidt was active in the development of electrolatino, electrogospel, and aciton music.

Uwe Schmidt began making music in the early 1980s, first playing drums, then switching to programming a drum computer after he had heard a Linn Drum on the radio.

Uwe Schmidt played his first live show as Lassigue Bendthaus as the opening act for the British group Meat Beat Manifesto at the Frankfurt Batschkapp in 1989.

Still living in Frankfurt, Uwe Schmidt was directly influenced by the emerging "pre-techno" movement of the late 1980s known as house and acid house.

Uwe Schmidt produced and co-wrote titles such as "Ongaku" and "Cosmic Love", which became successful prototypes for the appearing trance movement.

Also releasing on POD Communication was the German artist Pete Namlook whom Uwe Schmidt first met at the POD office in Frankfurt.

Together with Tobias Freund, who by then used the Pink Elln pseudonym, Uwe Schmidt played a live show at one of the first rave parties ever in Finland in 1992.

In 1993, Uwe Schmidt released the follow-up album to Matter: Lassigue Bendthaus' Cloned.

Uwe Schmidt felt that the DJ and the dance floor were limiting targets for his musical output and that many of his musical ideas would not be compatible with it.

Uwe Schmidt collaborated with Namlook under the names Millenium and as Subsequence.

Right after the release and re-release of the Lassigue Bendthaus albums, Uwe Schmidt began to work on the last album to be released under that project name called Pop Artificielle.

In 1995, Uwe Schmidt collaborated with Bill Laswell and Tetsu Inoue on the Fax release Second Nature, which was recorded at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn.

Two more +N and Datacide albums were produced between 1993 and 1996 as well as one album each month on Rather Interesting, all of them under different names that Uwe Schmidt later refers to as working titles, headlines, or simply "words that label a musical idea" rather than being aliases or projects in the traditional sense.

Uwe Schmidt continued releasing one album per month on his Rather Interesting label, although due to the difficulties of adaptation in Chile, decided to reduce his output.

Uwe Schmidt obtained official permission by Kraftwerk themselves to release El Baile Aleman, though had to remove his version of "Radioactivity".

Still, Uwe Schmidt spent most of the time touring with his Senor Coconut moniker, which had grown to a full 9-man orchestra.

Uwe Schmidt argued that the criticism was a "smear campaign" against him.