Pop Artificielle

This CD it's just CLASSIC. If you like electronic listening music and you've never heard this please do now, you won't regret it. A work of Uwe Schmidt aka Atom Heart aka a million other names (LB stands for his older Lassigue Bendthaus moniker), it was released through KK Records (at first) in 1998.

It's a tribute record, mostly. A number of pop/rock/funk classics are surgically dissected, pieced together and electrobolted back to life by Mr. Schmidt, yet with (some) respect for the originals. And far far away from the nowdays concept for an easy cover track, which constitutes of dropping everything but the beats and the bass, adding some 'dubby' echoes and the currently 'modern' production tricks and cashing on the dancefloor.

The production must have took ages to come to an end. Full of ultra-detailed programming, full of hand-made glitches and clicks and drones and noises before the Clicks 'n' Cuts compilations, it's a digital poem shining like a diamond through a mist of noise. And it shines because of the vocals. It's customary to say (it says so on the booklet) that they were produced by Raw(TM), some self-developed voice-emulator synthesis software, although curiously I couldn't trace anywhere a single line on this elusive source of fractured, vocoderized voices. Once you hear it though the result is very difficult to forget, especially in 'Angie' or 'Silence is Golden', real voices or not.

It's interesting that this album precedes the Senor Coconut's 'El Baile Aleman' as a cover album. The Senor Coconut facade had already been functional, yet 'El Gran Baile' is an electronic avant-guard album with excursions into Latin rhythmology, not an attempt to play or cover pop songs (I'll post it soon). Anyway, I think that later on he decided to have some more fun at the time he was paying tribute to the Robots.

LB - 1998 Pop Artificielle
Info here.

Generic info on Atom here and here.