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Sunday 11
SEÑOR COCONUT & HIS ORQUESTRA FEAT. Argenis Brito
YELLOW FEVER Tour 2008

Guadalajara- Plaza de la Liberación
21:00 Hrs

Señor Coconut and his Orchestra (feat. Argenis Brito)
Yellow Fever!

Essay Recordings is proud to introduce the latest instalment in the vaunted legacy of Señor Coconut, the world's only German/Chilean "electrolatino" interpreter of pop standards. This time out, Coconut—famous for his laptop-salsa and acid-merengue covers of Kraftwerk, Sade, and Michael Jackson—is back with a proper Latin big band, fronted by the inimitable Venezuelan singer Argenis Brito, to pay homage to Kraftwerk's Eastern counterparts in the annals of techno-pop pioneers, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Making the orchestra that much more magical, all three of YMO's members—Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto—make guest appearances on the album. And rounding out the barmy, mixed-up social club, the album features a host of distinguished collaborators from all corners of the electronic-music world—including Towa Tei, Burnt Friedman, Mouse on Mars, Akufen, Schneider TM and Nouvelle Vague's Marina—in a series of playful, cryptic interludes that aim to crack open, once and for all, the mystery of Señor Coconut.

Everyone has heard of "desert island discs"—those collections of treasured albums that one would absolutely have to have in his possession if stranded on a desert island deep in the South Pacific. Imagine, for a moment, that this album is a variation on that theme: the mysterious Señor Coconut (more on him in a moment), finding himself shipwrecked on a desolate rock in the middle of the deep blue, hauls out his iPod, filled to the last gigabyte with recordings of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra (again, hold your horses, we'll get to them). The problem with the desert island disc scenario, of course, is logistical: what to do when the batteries run out? Fortunately Coconut has a backup plan: his fellow passengers just happening to be the members of an immensely talented Latin big band, he quickly has them learn the parts to 10 of his favourite YMO songs, and voilá: a yellow magic overload to last until the rescue ships come. The only catch, of course: this time the synth-pop classics are rendered as mambo, merengue, bolero and cha-cha-cha.

Of course, none of this is true—although from the sound of the record, you could be forgiven for believing otherwise. The real story is a bit more prosaic (but only a bit, when you think about it). Señor Coconut is probably the best-known project of the man born as Uwe Schmidt. A core participant in Frankfurt, Germany's electronic-music scene in the early '90s and the proprietor of the Rather Interesting label, he has long been revered by a relatively (let's face it) miniscule audience of techno fans, industrial heads, and experimental-music obsessives for hundreds of records released under a dizzying array of aliases and collaborations: Atom Heart, AtomTM, Lisa Carbon Trio, Dots, Flextone, Midisport, Lassigue Bendthaus, DOS Tracks, Flanger, Datacide, Ongaku, Geeez 'N' Gosh, Masters of Psychedelic Ambiance… the list goes on, and on, and on.

In 1997—around the same time, incidentally, that he moved from Frankfurt to Santiago, Chile—Schmidt debuted the Señor Coconut project with El Gran Baile, a hyperkinetic collection of tracks sourced from Schmidt's collection of classic Latin records, cut up and rearranged into songs whose genres—Nova Raro, Jive Eclectico, Samba Virtual—existed only in Schmidt's expansive imagination. The results sounded like a fusion of Perez Prado and Raymond Scott, tinged with triple-time breaks and tingly as a funny bone. But it was with 2000's El Baile Alemán that Señor Coconut y su conjunto—as he now called himself, his "conjunto" (backing band) consisting only of his samplers—that Coconut's creative vehicle rolled out of the side-roads of novelty records and sped onto the Autobahn of the popular imagination. On El Baile Alemán (The German Dance) Schmidt did the only logical thing for a German electronic musician fascinated with Latin rhythms and instrumentation: he covered the iconic German group Kraftwerk's greatest hits—"Showroom Dummies," "Trans Europe Express," "Autobahn" and others—in tropical styles ranging from cumbia to merengue, with Mambotour's Argenis Brito and Chilean political rockers Los Prisioneros' Jorge Gonzalez on vocals.

No mere gimmick, El Baile Alemán was like a dissertation on pop music's global contradictions, subtly tweaking the conventional wisdom on authenticity, identity and tradition, while—hardly the least of its successes—demonstrating that Kraftwerk were not just technological whizzes and masters of iconography, but also pretty formidable tunesmiths. (At the same time, the album challenged the very definition of "electronic music," reminding listeners that contemporary salsa and merengue are often as programming-intensive as the most glitch-added Teutonic techno.)

Schmidt's own backstory made the project more complicated than it might seem. On the one hand, here was a German living in Chile, reworking his native country's greatest pop stars in a distinctively "regional" musical language. Some critics cried exploitation, while lazy reviewers chalked it all up to essentialism, seeing Schmidt's new musical direction (which had been planned long before his move to Chile) as a "natural" extension of his emigration. What the former missed was the keen-eyed sense of humor marking Schmidt's avowed distance from both traditions; the latter slept on the fact that Chile, despite the odd palm tree, is a far different beast from the Caribbean cultures that gave birth to tropical music like cumbia and merengue. Señor Coconut, far from some biographical inevitability, was more like a meditation on exile, outsiderism, and the fascinating happenstance of cultural exchange. (It didn't hurt, of course, that you could dance to it.)

Schmidt's subsequent projects under the Coconut moniker might be thought of as detours of a sort. After a successful tour translated the Kraftwerk material from Schmidt's hard drive into frenetic big-band arrangements, Schmidt launched Señor Coconut and His Orchestra, recording northern pop standards—Sade's "Smooth Operator," the Doors' "Riders on the Storm"—in his now-familiar "electrolatino" style for 2003's Fiesta Songs. And for 2005's Señor Coconut Presents Coconut FM: Legendary Latin Club Tunes, Coconut's first record for Frankfurt's Essay Recordings label, Schmidt put on his curator's hat, presenting a selection of reggaeton, funk carioca and cumbia that obliterated the lines between "underground" and "mainstream" just as surely as it blurred the very concept of "electronic" music. (Once again, dancing is virtually required, especially when Schmidt adopts his Don Atom persona to introduce the world's first example of acid reggaeton, or "aciton.")

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