Emastered Atom

This earlier work from Atom Heart is a far cry from what he's doing nowadays. Actually, compared to his recent output, it doesn't even really sound like the same artist. This retrospect is interesting because it shows the natural evolution that all artists undergo. This record was made at a time when Uwe Schmidt was concentrating on several styles at a time, and "Softcore" falls into a hazily defined bracket of IDM, with several tracks being quite ambient and others being just odd in general. Atom Heart is composing with a much simpler template here and resultantly the tracks sound very structured and much more mellow. All the tracks make nice well-constructed wholes, but as you let your ears wander over them all of the individual sounds are quite interesting in their own regard.

Beat-oriented freestylism with Namlook mostly in charge of melodies (some dark some light) while Atom Heart pounds out some morphing drum tracks through various alienating filters. All the Jet Chamber releases demonstrate some interesting live-sounding interaction: drums react to melodies and vice versa. JC1 ranges from being quite musical to more abstract wind-tunnel howlings with reverb the size of airplane hangers.