Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Lassigue Bendthaus : Superbad (Soul Substitute)

Lassigue Bendthaus is one of the many many nom de plume's for Uwe Schmidt (also know as Atom Heart and Señor Coconut), a German musician who dabbles primarily in electronic music. In the mid-90's he developed his own software that performs "vocal simulation based on vocal resynthesis generated from original vocal raw material". So, what I take from that is, the software samples his vocals, chops them up, then reconstructs them, which introduces all sorts of interesting digital artifacts. It's along the lines of "glitch" music, where the digital edges and errors of electronics and samples, rather than being fixed or smoothed over, are embraced and used as the very source material for the piece. The vocals are chopped into tiny phonemes which are repeated and stretched providing a very robotic sound.

"Super Bad" is an early James Brown original, and as such is an extremely analog piece of hard funk. One of the cool things about Uwe's version is that, even though the song is completely reliant on digital technology, constructed completely in the realm of the electronic, from the programmed drums to the android vocals to the synthesized horns, he's managed to keep the organic funk of the original. Even with all the bleeps and bloops, it rocks, and though it doesn't have the sheer sweat-soaked fury of the original, it could easily wind up a dance floor.

The album, Pop Artificielle, consists of ten covers of a wide variety of musicians, from Donovan to Prince to ABC (which I almost posted instead), all done in this very digital vein. It's an excellent album and a fun listen.

[You can listen to Lassigue Bendthaus' "Superbad (Soul Substitute)" by navigating to the post "Song057" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]


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