Uwe Schmidt begins his move towards less gimmicky music. For those of you not familiar, he has indulged himself heavily in the Senor Coconut moniker for quite some time. Senor Coconut takes techno and has it re-interpreted by a full band, giving it Latin American embellishments. El Baile Aleman was interesting, but continuing the re-interpretations for a decade felt a bit of overkill.
Thankfully, with this he returns back to his roots of weird electronic music. Of course, there is a twist with this album, like he employs with all of his work. Here he focuses on the more romantic side of German music, mixing Franz Schubert with Kraftwerk (hence the robotic vocals).
It starts off more abstract, and slowly he introduces the listener to warmer pastures. Unfortunately, some of the abstraction comes off a bit jokingly, which grates on one’s nerves. But it is over halfway through the 20 odd tracks when it doesn’t matter whether he is kidding.
“Weisses Rauschen” easily surpasses the rest of the material on here. It cleverly mixes the emotional with the clinical detachment that he’s been striving to hit the entire album. The gentle arrangement is surprisingly warm and tender; especially considering this is a Raster Noton release.
Overall, it isn’t a bad album. There’s a lot to enjoy here. But the problem I have is that a great amount of the suites are underdeveloped. And only at the end do you actually get what Uwe’s statement is supposed to be. And without the beautiful German robotic singing (which is surprisingly touching) it would not be anywhere as lovely.