Señor Coconut and His
Orchestra
Fiesta Songs
Re-mastered, re-designed plus exclusive bonus tracks
Essay Recordings AY CD 25 (EAN 881390202522)
Vertriebe: Indigo (D), Universal (A), COD-Musikvertrieb (CH)
Release: 30.04.2010
Das Jubiläum: 10 Jahre Señor Coconut Señor Coconut hat Anlass zu feiern: Vor 10 Jahren stellte er sein einzigartiges Projekt anlässlich der Popkomm (damals noch vital und in Köln ansässig) vor. Seither ist er durch die Welt getourt, hat auf allen Kontinenten seine CD-Produktionen veröffentlicht. Seine Songs finden sich auf Hunderten von Compilations, in Werbespots (vor kurzem Heineken in den USA), in Filmsoundtracks. Er stand mit Heroen, wie dem Yellow Magic Orchestra auf der Bühne. Musiker wie Joe Jackson, David Bowie oder Nouvelle Vague sind bekennende Fans. Es ist also Zeit, Rückschau zu halten und auch seine ersten Alben wieder zu veröffentlichen. Das natürlich in typischem Coco-Style – mit Liebe, Sorgfalt und Detailversessenheit. In den USA kümmert sich schon seit dem letzten Jahr Nacional Records, das führende Label für "Latin Alternative Music", um sein Oeuvre. Señor Coconut wird aus Anlass des Geburtstags wieder mit seiner teuflisch gut eingespielten Band auf Tour gehen.
Wenn Deep Purple und Michael Jackson sich im Ballroom treffen: Fiesta Songs Mit ihrem Album "Fiesta Songs" beweisen Señor Coconut und sein Orchester, dass die Wiege aller populären Musik in Südamerika beheimatet ist. Wie ein Herz, das mit seinem Rhythmus das musikalische Weltgeschehen am Leben erhält, pumpt sich die Combo durch ein Repertoire von Megahits, die in einer Zeit entstanden sind, als Künstler noch keine One-Hit-Wonder waren. Wenn man Señor Coconut schmeicheln möchte, könnte man ihm den Ehrentitel "Perez Prado der Elektronik" geben. Und man hätte auf mehreren Ebenen recht: Beide sind Exilanten und haben große Werke fernab der Heimat geschaffen. Beide haben an einem Hybrid aktueller Popmusik gearbeitet und Stile erschaffen, die später als ganz logisch, ja fast schon traditionell empfunden wurden. Und die Gemeinschaft aller Tanzenden stellt sich die subtile Frage sowieso nicht: Kann ich darauf tanzen? Ja – und wie!
Nach einer erfolgreichen Tour, bei der die Kraftwerk-Tracks (von El Baile Alemán) von Schmidts Harddrive in ein frenetisches Big Band-Arrangement umgesetzt wurden, nahm Uwe Schmidt das Album Fiesta Songs in Angriff, auf dem er nordische Pophits – "Smooth Operator" von Sade, "Riders on the Storm" von The Doors – in seinen inzwischen wohlbekannten "Electro-Latino"-Style umsetzte. "Smoke On The Water", das wohl am meisten gecoverte Rockriff aller Zeiten, bildet die Ouverture, "Beat it" von Michael Jackson schließt den Reigen der Cover, denn "Electrolatino" ist ein Stück aus der Feder des Meisters selbst.
Señor Coconut alias Atom™ überführt die Klassiker in einen Computer-generierten Orchestersound aus Mambo, Cha Cha Cha und Merengue und klingt dabei so organisch. Er stellt die durch riesige Audio-Datenmengen erzeugte Illusion von "Authentizität" in Frage, wie auch die Einteilung von Musik in "echt" oder "falsch", "akustisch" oder "elektronisch". Für ihn sind alle Daten gleichwertig, ob live eingespielt oder von Festplatte. Ein solches Statement erstaunt, denn entweder ist Musik live und damit authentisch oder man hört sie reproduziert als Tonträger. Und dass jede Reproduktion nicht dem Original entspricht, versteht sich von selbst.
Atom™ über sein Album: "Fiesta Songs" verlässt den offensichtlichen Bezug zu meinem elektronischen Ursprung und befasst sich mit der Simulation eines akustischen Retro-Latino-Sounds. Es wurden anglo-amerikanische Pophits gecovered. Diese Simulation wird stellenweise durch digitale Artefakte enttarnt. Auch hier wollte ich wieder einen neuen Schritt in meiner Produktionsweise wagen: Anstelle einer hundertprozentigen Programmierung habe ich zum ersten Mal Musiker aufgenommen und das Material dann mit originalen Latino-Samples zu etwas völlig Neuem verschmolzen.
Tracklisting
1. Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)
2. Negra mi Chachacha (Facundo Rivero)
3. Riders on the Storm (The Doors)
4. Smooth Operator (Sade)
5. El rey de las Galletas
6. Oxygene (Part II) (Jean Michel Jarre)
7. Blue Eyes (Elton John)
8. Las Maracas de Machin
9. Beat it (Michael Jackson)
10. Electrolatino
Bonus Tracks
11. Humo en el agua (Spanish version of Smoke on the Water)
12 Blue Eyes (Karaoke Version)
13. Smooth Operator (Version Suave)
BIOGRAFIE SR. COCONUT
Interview with Senor Coconut by Philip Sherburne www.philipsherburne.com
Santiago (Chile), April 1st 2006
1.) To start off, could you tell us a little about the new
album – the title of it, who you're going to be revisioning
this time, and how the concept came about?
The album will be called Yellow Fever, it will contain 10 cover
versions of YMO songs plus 10 interludes and little intersections which
will be my compositions and will contain the contributions of various
guest musicians from all over the world, such as Akufen, Schneider tm,
Nouvelle Vague… who else.
2.) Dandy Jack?
Dandy Jack, Mouse on Mars, Towa Tei. All the sounds, then –
we managed to invite the original YMO members to play and sing on the
songs, so there's huge list of guests and contributors. How the idea
came about, well – with Señor Coconut, when I'm
going on tour and giving interviews and meeting people, there are
always a lot of suggestions made – people come up with their
ideas, you know, who should be next, and even sometimes fans will pass
me self-made fake Señor Coconut albums; there was this one
guy who came up to me and said "You have to cover those songs," and
he'd made a CD with a sleeve he'd photocopied and stuff. SO there's
always people saying, you should do that, you should do this. And in
fact Señor Coconut is a very inspiring project to many
people in that sense, because of the cover versions and the whole
exotica cover version genre allows you to do so many things. And
there's a lot of possibilities, whom to cover. So when I was thinking
about the next album, there were actually a lot of options, and there
are still a lot of possible albums. It was just a matter of finding the
right moment for the right project, talking to Argenis and to the
management, it was just a question of feeling what could be the most
interesting. To me, on a musical level it was all equally entertaining,
it could have been anything, basically.
3.) You started Señor Coconut with the Kraftwerk
covers…
No, actually I started Señor Coconut with an album called El
Gran Baile, which was a bit different, it was more like merging what I
was doing back then – cut and paste electronica –
with my interest for Latin music. So I started to cut up Latin
loops…
4.) So the first one wasn't covers, just your compositions in
a cut-up Latin style.
Exactly, and more track-oriented, like cutting up Latin music in a
track style.
5.) So then the Kraftwerk cover project was the one that
gained you the most notoriety, then Fiesta Songs had Sade, Michael
Jackson, "Smoke on the Water," etc.; this time out, were you
specifically interested in another project that would allow you to
cover the work of a single artist?
The thing was that after the Kraftwerk covers, I didn't want to do the
same thing over again, make a Depeche Mode album or whatever. I saw the
concept more loosely, and I just wanted to have an entertaining
collection of music, mainly being inspired by a series of releases from
the '60s and '70s from Latin artists, who did basically that, just
threw together their favorite songs and covered them, mixed them with
their own stuff. It was quite a relaxed concept. And I felt like after
Fiesta Songs it could be more entertaining to go back to that
one-artist concept, but since I don't really like to repeat myself, I
wanted to expand it on a musical level too. I think Yellow Fever for
that reason is like a blend of the last three albums; it has these
cut-and-paste kind of track interludes between the songs, which are
very abstract and programmed but played by guest musicians and then cut
up. So production-wise it's like a blend of the last three albums,
which was my way of making this album entertaining, of finding a new
approach and going to the next level.
6.) Why YMO? Are you a longtime fan? Were they influential to
your own musical upbringing?
As compared to Kraftwerk, they were. I sort of missed Kraftwerk, I was
too young when they were famous, and when I really got interested in
music, it was the last album – so I missed them [in their
prime] and got into them for different reasons. Which doesn't mean I
wouldn't appreciate them, but they weren't really important for my
musical socialization. On the other hand, when I was like 16 or 17 and
I started to listen to non-commercial electronic music, I got really
interested in industrial and noise and that kind of stuff, and then for
a short period into Electronic Body Music, and then techno came up. And
house and acid and all that. But all the music I listened to had a very
similar attitude, a very similar feeling – like the European
electronica was always a bit dense, and especially EBM was a bit dark
and aggressive, and even I would say that commercial electronica like
Depeche Mode and the new wave stuff had a depressive, melancholic feel
to it. And then a friend of mine, around '85 or '86, gave me a mix tape
of YMO and Sakamoto and Hosono and other Japanese artists of that time,
which were released on Alpha records…. it was like this
bubble around Yellow Magic Orchestra. It was after YMO's success, and
it was more about their solo works. And what really struck me was that
the attitude was totally different; it was a totally positive
understanding of music—sometimes funny, and always very
positive, in a futuristic sense, but without the futurist pathos. Not
"we are the future," just a very modern Japanese attitude. The
Japanese, I would say, are not very philosophical about progress, they
just do it. While Europeans are always very reflective about it. The
Japanese just do it; they always had the newest equipment, the newest
sound, they recorded digitally in the '80s, and all that was a very
positive feeling. And that was really a switch the first time I
listened to Japanese electronic music, it was a really different
horizon to me. I was like, wow, that's a different approach –
and I think it triggered a lot about how I perceived my own work back
then, the possibilities and especially a certain attitude towards
making music.
7.) I think you can see a certain degree of a sense of humor
in YMO; or if not humor—although there was a record with
comedy sketches interspersed between the songs, and for instance on
"Pure Jam," the lyric "This must be the ugliest piece of bread I've
ever eaten," there's a sense of absurdity that seems very different
from the European sense of darkness you're describing.
Exactly, I think that was the point of it, and also something I
realized just recently when investigating the histories of the memberes
of Yellow Magic and their backgrounds, that for them exotica was a very
big influence. And a totally different type of music than what I
listened to or what I knew. They did rock and blues in the early days
with Japanese traditional music, and finally when I started listening
to Japanese music, I started listening to Martin Denny—it was
a totally different thing to me, I never connected those. And then I
realized that for YMO, Martin Denny also had been very important. They
covered Martin Denny; also Hosono once showed me a picture of him and
Martin Denny; he's such a big fan he once flew to Hawaii and visited
him. And then I realized there was a certain synchronicity with the
exotica approach, which they sort of merged with their Japanese
background—the production, the melodies, it's all a very
traditional perspective on music. So suddenly there were lots of pieces
of the puzzle falling together, which I found quite impressive.
8.) How did the members of YMO respond when you approached
them with the project?
I made two albums with Hosono in the mid '90s, '95 and '97; the project
was me and my friend Tetsu Inoue from New York, and Hosono, and it was
called H.A.T. I knew Hosono from before and he was visiting me in
Santiago when I had just moved here in '98; he came here and we
recorded parts of the second album here, and I visited him in Japan,
and every time I'm in Japan I try to see him. It's not a frequent
contact we have, but it's still a contact. And also a couple of years
ago Sakamoto was inviting me for one of his projects, and last year at
Sonar Tokyo, because they played as Sketch Show, I met all of them,
that whole YMO bubble, like their management, and a lot of people that
were involved back then, had been A&R, studio, production,
publishing… So I met all these people, and I'd say it was in
the pre-stage of Yellow Fever, where I was just sorting out ideas for
what would be possible. And when I started working on the record, it
was a bit difficult to get in touch with them because of the management
topic in Japan; you have to go through management and even though I was
in personal touch with them, I could not approach them on a business
level. So we had to go through labels and managers and A&Rs,
and it was a very long process where nothing happened, actually. Until
we just contacted Sakamoto directly, in parallel through his
management, and everybody was really into it, and I sent them a couple
of demo mixes and they said, Yeah, great! It's really entertaining, and
if we can participate, if it's possible we will.
I think it's a bit in their line of musical history; it's kind of like
twisting it again. They covered Martin Denny and all this background
and transformed it into futuristic '80s pop, and now I'm transforming
it back into the original thing. I think they find that entertaining
too.
9.) How did you select the songs to include? Was there a
process of experimentation to determine which would be more adaptable
to the Coconut style?
This time it was a bit more difficult than the times before; for
instance on the Kraftwerk covers, it was very much just a musical
decision of trying to imagine the flow of the album, and saying ok, how
many fast songs, how many slow songs, how many cha-cha-chas compared to
the number of cumbias. That was more the perspective because there were
so many songs that worked that in the end it was more like a stylistic
process. The next album was a bit the same; I had a long list of songs
and it was more about finding the right mix for the album. While on
Yellow Fever, it was a bit more complex because not all the songs had
been composed by all three of them together, but they were usually
separate compositions—one song would be only by Sakamoto, one
only by Hosono, one only by Takahashi—and there were very few
mixed compositions where all of them are involved. So that was one
concern, trying not to just pick Sakamoto songs or just Hosono songs;
and at the same time it was important to get the songs I liked and had
selected transposed into the Coconut style, which was not possible for
all of them. And at the same time, I needed to get an interesting flow
on the album, so they were three parameters that were really difficult
to match up; it was quite a headache at times.
10.) And one more factor to think of, there were singles and hits in certain territories, so the record company wanted to include the singles and hits and the better known songs. So it was a very difficult selection to make, trying to have it be well done on a musical level but also to satisfy the needs of the original record companies and also trying not to offend the musicians because there weren't enough songs from each of them…. which in the end happened, because there are four Sakamoto songs, and then three and three Hosono or Takahashi songs. But they were the best I could do, bearing all these parameters in mind.
11.) Listening back to the originals after hearing your
versions, I was struck by how many Latin elements were already there,
implicit in their original rhythms. From your acquaintance with them,
do you think they were aware of it at the time? Was that an explicit
influence?
I think that they're very good musicians and very well-informed
musicians with long histories of making and listening to music, and
they have a huge knowledge of musical styles; I think all these bits of
information you just have subconsciously available when you want to
make a groove or something. It's not that you say, ok, is that
syncopated or not, it's more like, does it move or not? Does it swing
or not?
12.) How did you go about creating the versions this time?
What sort of studio technologies did you use?
Let me tell you a bit about the development of the last albums. The
first one was basically sampling from CDs and programming; there were
no songs involved so it was just cutting up tracks. Also very few
vocals. On the second album it was about songs, but I didn't have
musicians available, or didn't want to, except for the vocalist, so
what I did was the same as the album before, I just cut up my record
collection and recombined Kraftwerk songs out of the bits and pieces,
so it was all programmed in the end. On Fiesta Songs, I didn't want to
repeat that method; it wasn't really entertaining to simply do over
again with Sade or Elton John. So I went to record musicians in
Denmark, I just brought my laptop and a little audio interface and I
went to a friend of mine in Denmark who wrote parts of the scores for
some songs; mainly I called the musicians into the studio and we
recorded slices. They never played together; and it was all very
unorganized in the arrangement. And since there were no written scores,
I mainly just sent them what I wanted to hear. It was like, here in the
original we have that part, and I want the tenor sax to play that part.
So they'd have to listen to it and play it. So afterwards, on my hard
drive I had bits and pieces of what I wanted—a tenor here, a
trumpet there—and when I got home I realized after recording,
which was done really quickly, in about a week, that I had missed out
on some parts; there was the tenor for the A and B but not for the C
part, so I had to make solutions, basically invent the final
arrangement, combining it with samples again from Latin records, which
I usually use to create a certain texture or atmosphere, or for the
groove for example I'll take a sample from Tito Puente and cut all the
recorded material to the groove of Tito Puente, so while recording the
percussionist doesn't really have to think about groove, he'll just
play more or less to a certain swing, and then afterwards I would cut
up the whole song towards a certain groove.
Having done that, which was a step forward in my opinion, I didn't want
to repeat myself again on the new album. So this time I found someone
in Germany, Norberg Kramer [???], who's also playing the vibraphone in
the live band, and I asked him—he's a studied classical
percussionist—I asked if he'd be interested in writing the
scores for the songs. So he listened to the songs, and first
transcribed them, because there were no MIDI files available, and based
upon the transcription we talked about which style we would like to
cover and which kind of arrangements we would like to do. So he did
really complex horn arrangements, so the whole thing was much better
thought out. Like, how many instruments do we have, which instrument is
playing what, in which section… The voicing is quite real, I
would say. Where on Fiesta Songs there was a very basic voicing. My
knowledge of voicing, and especially horn voicing and arrangement is
nonexistent, and it's a very complex thing to do.
So he did all that, so the whole arrangement foundation is much more
advanced than on the last record. So it makes it much easier for me to
think about different parts of the arrangement; it's all there, and now
I can fuck it up again. That's where I'm going back to the first and
second Coconut albums and saying, now we have a nice-sounding, well
done horn arrangement so let's play around with it; I can focus now on
totally different things. I don't have to make it sound good because it
already sounds good; now I can get into the depth of the arrangement.
Which also means I can rearrange what's there in the original
recordings, but combine it much much more with sampling. That's what I
didn't do too much on the last record, because of the amount of work I
had to invest on the arrangement itself.
The idea is to achieve a certain complexity in the compositions, which
again is a step forward compared to the last albums.
13.) Is part of this learning curve a result of having gone
through the live experience with Señor Coconut and the big
band, since you had to translate what you'd originally written by
sampling for a live band?
I would say it has to do with my personal interest in learning new
things and making new sounds, making new music I haven't done before.
I'm getting really bored if I have to repeat myself in a certain
production method or musical approach, so it was basically, ok, if I
make a new record, what's in it for me? It's not just about making
music and selling a record, that's not the point; the point is to make
it entertaining to me and to learn something from it. That's why we
decided this time to produce it this way.
As for the recording method itself, I flew with my laptop and a little ProTools audio interface to a little studio in Cologne; it was basically a rehearsal space with a little recording cabin, basically you had a pair of speakers and the computer and a good pair of microphones, and then we had musicians coming in from Denmark and Germany and recorded first the rhythm section, then the bass, then the horn section, etc. etc.
14.) So your raw material—is it essentially a full,
Latinized version of each YMO song that you're now re-editing and
rearranging, or do you just have discrete pieces?
We listened to all the songs after the recording session, and they
sound—some more, some less—the way I wanted them to
sound. But there are some more unorganized songs on the record, where
it's not clear where to go, and then there are some that are almost
ready. With some of the songs, it wasn't clear while recording them
what the groove would be, exactly, and I knew that I had to find a
sample to accommodate the whole song. And every now and then I even
have to change the entire bass, because the bass was in the wrong
rhythm—so I'll use the notes of the bass, but adapt it to a
Tito Puente, say. Which is a lot of work.
15.) You mentioned earlier the many collaborators on the new
record—what are they going to be doing exactly?
I had the selection of the songs, and before recording I had
distributed them across the album, as in the album will start with song
X and finish with song Y, trying to get a flow of the album so not all
the cha-cha-chas hang together, for instance. And then my idea was to
get little interludes, a bit inspired by that record of YMO where they
had these funny little sequences and monologues in between; and my idea
that the theme of the interludes would basically be, "What is Coconut?"
It's all about Coconut. So I went with a microphone to interview people
at parties, friends of mine, just "What is Coconut?" out of the blue.
And they'd talk, and I used some of their conclusions, which was very
much improvised speech, I'd say. I'm trying to get a sort of mysterious
concept, I would say—the whole album is about something,
which I don't know what it is, but it's more or less about defining
Coconut, and that whole twist which is going on. So you have these
Yellow Magic songs which are Latin Japanese hybrids, and in the middle
you have these cut-and-paste interviews which are explaining, not in a
logical sense, but giving hints as to what the whole Coconut concept is
about.
As an example, we have a Sakamoto song, "Music Plans," which ends with
the lines, "Making music, what a plan, breaking music." And then
there's another song that comes after that, and I had to fill that gap.
So I was inspired by the phrase "breaking music," and so I said to
Burnt Friedman, The working title is "Breaking Music"; I'll give you a
little rhythm, and you just break it, and this is the interlude.
All of those collaborators, they're not all equal, they don't have the
same backgrounds, so I tried to find their place, what could they do,
what would fit, in which interlude. Which was not clear from the
beginning; it depended a bit on how the songs came together and which
interlude fit for whom. For Akufen, for example, I had this little
track which was called "Disco a Go-Go/Coco a Go-Go," which
fit… well, you'll hear later on when it's finished; it has
references to the song before, which is "Tong Poo," and perfectly leads
into the song after it. So I just gave him a Latin disco beat which I
chopped up in a very rough and quick way, and I said ok, your song goes
in between this song and this song and it's called "Disco a Go-Go" so
you can just go ahead and chop it up further… It was very
much trying to see what he could do, what fits with his taste and his
way of working.
Marina, for example, from Nouvelle Vague, is a vocalist, not a musician
in the pure sense, so I invented a dialogue between a man and a woman,
and I said, ok, your part will be the left channel, and on the right
channel there will be Towa Tei—in fact, his voice
computer—responding. So I invented a dialogue; it's a bit
like, you know the song "Mucha Muchcacha" from Esquivel? It's a little
conversation going on for like 30 seconds, and then the song continues.
So I was very much inspired by that; I had a little song and basically
they're talking about the song—"Mambo Numerique," a digital
mambo, so basically they're saying "It's a digital mambo!" "Yeah! It's
nice!" And she speaks French and he speaks Japanese; so I had this
dialogue invented in English, and I said to Marina you translate it
into French; the BPM is that, try to send different takes, one more
sensual, one more serious, etc. And I said the same to Towa, who
programmed his vocal program which speaks Japanese; I sent him the
dialogue and some parts that Marina had done, and he finished it and I
threw it together.
It's stuff like that; trying to find little spaces for all these
people.