When it was released in 2000, El Baile Alemán was grandly – and not entirely without irony – billed as »the future of electronic music«, right there on the back cover of the second Señor Coconut album, the project of Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom™. The concept – Kraftwerk covers with Latin American rhythms – may sound at first like a boozy joke, but it has real substance, works brilliantly and, even a quarter of a century later, still feels remarkably fresh and great fun. The Düsseldorf robots are lubricated here with sun cream rather than machine oil, and though they dance a little awkwardly and stiffly at the hips, they remain perfectly in time with cha-cha-cha, merengue and cumbia; every so often there is a glitch, and a few sparks fly.
The minimalist, Prussian severity of the source material, paired with the tropical warmth of the rhythms – plus a few samples and breakbeats – produces moments that are as seductive as they are funny, and leaves the whole thing feeling as retrofuturist as it is difficult to pin down. Yet this idiosyncratic sound has remained so fresh precisely because Schmidt’s electrolatino did not in fact become the future of EDM. A few years after Señor Coconut, it was more closely related styles such as reggaeton and tropical bass that managed that instead – showing that the future of yesterday can by tomorrow already have become a quickly fading trend. In that sense, it may even be a blessing that Señor Coconut’s »German dances« never found their way into any mainstream.
El Baile Aleman
