Senor Coconut

Senor Coconut, also known as Uwe Schmidt, became popular in Moscow a long time ago – for his covers of the band Kraftwerk and a music video about the life of rubber dolls. Uwe Schmidt is a true virtuoso, a legend, and a sensation of modern electronics, whose productivity and activity amaze the imagination. In ten years, he managed to realize numerous musical projects under various pseudonyms (Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendthaus, Datacide, and Lisa Carbon Trio), release over a hundred records, and record remixes of compositions by major figures in contemporary music culture: Air, Depeche Mode, Martin Gore, Cesaria Evora, and Towa Tei. Uwe Schmidt began working with dance music, expanding the boundaries of dance standards while integrating jazz and funk rhythms, as well as 60s psychedelia. As is typical for Germans, he became fascinated with minimalism: minimal-hardcore, minimal-techno, minimal-trance, and then he unleashed a true multi-sound of atmospheric ambient and polyphony. Within the Atom Heart project, he worked with such respected individuals as Paul Schultze, Haruomi Hosono, Bill Laswell, and Peter Namlook, Titsu Inoue. It was Namlook, the owner of the famous label FAX, who helped Uwe open his sound recording company Rather Interesting, which became a true laboratory for further post-techno experiments.

Back in 1996, his career took off like a helium balloon, and then he made a completely inexplicable move. Leaving everything behind, Uwe Schmidt moved to Santiago, Chile, where he still lives today. New works by the maestro are released under the pseudonym 'Senor Coconut and His Orchestra'. In reality, the orchestra is still Uwe Schmidt with his minimalist home studio. His debut disc 'El Gran Baile', released with the help of his old friend Towa Tei from Deee-Lite, received the most enthusiastic reviews from critics, and rightfully so. The meticulous master turned 60s Latin American pop and national melodies into an ironic mix of two cultures, unimaginable retrofuturism. The next album 'El Baile Aleman' ('German Dance'), which consists of cover versions of Kraftwerk hits in lively samba, rumba, and cha-cha-cha rhythms, achieved worldwide success and received flattering praise from Florian Schneider, the founder of Kraftwerk. He couldn’t believe that such could be accomplished by one person rather than an orchestra of live musicians. Then followed the album 'Fiesta Songs' (2003) - a collection of covers of global pop and rock hits from the golden fund of world music. The compositions by Deep Purple, The Doors, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Michael Jackson are carefully painted in the most exotic colors and crafted in Latin rhythms and orchestrations of a virtual orchestra of 23 musicians.