Each Friday I'm going to dig through my cd collection and talk about a cd that really should be available for purchase, but alas and alack is gone daddy gone.
This week is going to be Render the 1994 album from Lassigue Bendthaus
Industrial music in 1994 was a strange creature. Nine Inch Nails brought it to the stereo of every kid in America with "that fuck you like an animal song" Many a Gap cloned minion swayed and made out to slick and sleazy Closer (which I always felt to be the ugliest song on TDS, an album that many a reviewer found to be one of the most emotionally devastating since Pink Floyd erected The Wall in 1979) little did they know of the emotional turmoil contained on the rest of the cd...
Uwe Schmidt had released 3 albums and 4 12" singles under his Lassigue Bendthaus moniker (Including the very underrated Cloned which used the same basic sample set to create several very different songs, and Cloned:Binary which gave those samples to end users for using in their own compositions. )
Render was different though. Render turned industrial music on it's ear. It took the ideas that Kraftwerk laid out in the 70's and early 80's and expanded on it, and perfected it. Beautiful minimalistic techno/industrial/ambient hybrid tracks that sound as fresh today as they did almost 12 years ago.
The album was a bit of a conundrum. Industrial kids didn't like it because it was too techno. Techno kids? Nahh... not weird enough in an Artificial Intelligence /Warp Records sort of way. But the people who were recording electronic music around that time found the album to be forward thinking enough to borrow elements from it (See haujobb's Solutions for a Small Planet , or even Madonna's 1998 Ray of LIght )
Herr Schmidt went on to record under His Atom Heart moniker, and gained a whole new fan base when he started releasing albums as Senior Coconut. He even managed to release a collection of pop covers as LB called Pop Artificielle which sounded more like the glitchy world of Atom than the warm minimalism of the former.
I wanted to share this album as the first of the woefully out of print, because it is to me one of the biggest crimes against the laptop generation of the electronic music scene to not have one of the last truly great albums recorded on outboard gear available to challenge their sensibilities.
A friend of mine once described Render as sounding like a "pop album from 2007", we are quickly approaching that year, and I can only hope that somebody creates something this fresh in the next year.
download Molecular Modelling
Atom Heart Discography
Ebay search forRender
1 comment:
this album is phenomenal piece. it changed my view of music in general. i was and idustrial guy and this was exactly what needed to be heard. the future. absolute future.
its lovelee to see it remeberred as well as it is in my brain.
uwe was 50 years ahead of his time.
thanks !!!
shawn rudiman
www.technoiraudio.com
www.inthemachineage.com
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