A leading light in experimental electronic music shares his optimism for the future.

i can proudly say i am sort of friends with Uwe. this is gonna be nice.

cool thanks

Thanks for that, i recommend this interview not only for musicians but also for every creative beeing ...

What is coconut?

In touch with tomorrow!

Very fascinating interview. Especially the last ten minutes where at times I couldn't tell if Mr. Schmidt was talking solely about the music industry and music as an artform collapsing or society writ large. I agree with him that it will be very hard to concieve of a future music given that we don't know what will be the future of the music industry, of recording and reproduction, of instrumentation, of zeitgeist, etc. That would factor well within the bounds of say Ray Kurtzweild's or Verner Vinge's theories about the technological singularity, a point at which technological developments cross a certain rubicon and our lives, our civilizations are so deeply affected that we can't live the same way after the singularity as we did before it. The shift from hunter gathering to agriculture would be a good example or the domestication of horses.

However, I have one bone to pick regarding the date of first recordation of music. Before music was reproduced in recordings on wax tubes and later on records etc that you could play back, music was very different and we can't concieve of it as it was then. I agree TO A CERTAIN EXTENT. Before audio recordings we had sheet music for recordation. Granted it didn't record the quality of a live performance of that music but it was recorded. However, the written record of music like so much of early civilization's history was limited to those who were music literate. So mostly only elite music was recorded. The introduction of audio recordings was like the creation of the Guttenberg printing press (ignoring for a moment that the Chinese invented printing presses long before Guttenberg...); it allowed a whole new audience of people to suddenly listen to and appreciate music that was previously unavailable to them, either because they weren't literate in musical annotations or weren't of a certain class. The audio recording also brought folk music to a wider audience than it had ever been exposed to before and recorded performances of folk music for posterity. Folk music was much more like the oral traditions of storytelling before audio recordings were disseminated en masse. By which I mean that folk music was often isolated by geography, no two performances of a song were the same, and songs evolved over time and repeated performance by multiple performers. Audio recording did not eliminate those tendencies of folk music, but it did expand the audience and to a certain extent reduced the amount of transformation a given folk tune underwent.

I guess what I'm saying is I think we can to some extent imagine what music was like before audio recordings because we have sheet music and we have folk traditions that are not yet dead.

barekilk, your points regarding pre-/post- are compelling, and as i'm sure you're aware, were the conceptual armature for walter benjamin's writings on technical reproducibility.

i'll have to listen to this interview before i can comment further, but i did an interview with herr schmidt earlier in the year, which can be read here: www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/feature/little-white-earbuds-interviews-uwe-schmidt-atom%E2%84%A2/

his thoughts were brilliant.

Great to hear the thoughts of a true musical innovator. Any chance of an RA mix from Uwe for an Xmas treat?

Bareklik and Ballyhoo, can you two lads get a room?

Interested to hear this one on the d/l atm =0

wonderful.

Hahaha. Yes, let's applaud anti-intellectualism. That's what this podcast, resident advisor, and electronic music in general are all about, right? ;-P

im really looking forward to hearing this set!

new Atom™ song debut http://godxiliary.com/bofetish/000003/

great interview..thnx RA