Hero with a Thousand Faces

I really know nothing about Uwe Schmidt - if fact I didn't even know his name until a couple of years ago. I stumbled on his Lassigue Bendthaus releases in the mid 1990s via a terrific remix on a Sielwolf album credited to that name. Lassigue discs proved to be near impossible to find except by mail order (this is pre-internet). As I hunted through catalogs of electronic music, I started to run across other "bands" listed as off-shoots of Lassigue Bendthaus. Then the internet appeared and research became much easier, though there was still little info about this mysterious artist. I eventually located a website that identified the perpetrator of all this amazing techno/industrial/electronica as a German named Uwe Schmidt.

Now living in Chile, he has cranked out a mammoth discography under more than 54 different aliases. Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendthaus, Jet Chamber, Datacide and Senior Coconut are the five most frequent; the other pseudonyms only have one or two discs per "group". It's still nearly impossible to find his stuff, though easier to know when he has something released. I usually stumble on them, like a few years ago in Minneapolis when I found an unprecidented four discs in one record store!

The truly amazing thing about his work is that even with the sheer amount of material he releases, each disc is different and worthwhile. While there are certainly some lesser albums, the overall quality of his body of work is astounding. Sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s he started a label called Rather Interesting which was devoted to releasing his material on a nearly monthly basis. Each release is unique and, erm... rather interesting.

Last updated: 21 October 2008.