I think it’s a fact that ‘Blue Monday‘ by New Order is the track that 2manydjs have played the most in their long career. But this 1979 song by Harry Thumann is a contender for ‘second most played song by 2manydjs’.
If you’ve been to one of their dj sets or one of the Despacio events, you would have recognised this remarkable piece of disco synth music from the first few notes.
Probably one of the first times I heard ‘Underwater’ was in the opening part of the ‘Hang The DJ‘ episode #4, that was broadcasted on September 8, 2001. It was the first track of this episode of their legendary radioshow, where they put the Blake Baxter sample ‘The Brothers Gonna Work It Out’ (at the time known because its use in ‘Leave Home’ by Chemical Brothers) on top.
Harry Thumann was a German electronic composer, record producer and sound engineer. He designed and built groundbreaking synthesizers and studio equipment from the early 1960s onwards.
Here’s some more relevant info taken from his wiki page:
Born Harald Thumann in Germany, he started out as a drummer while getting a thorough grounding in audio engineering in German broadcasting. When touring lost appeal, Thumann put his musical and technical experience to work and started his first recording studio in a bedroom at the family home. Thumann participated in the development of the SSL 4000 series of consoles, and took the first one for this studio. Premises for a permanent studio with live-in accommodation were found in Germering near Munich, and Country Lane Studios were born.
Thumann later recognised the potential of MIDI, and used Commodore 64 computers with MIDI cards, controlling a system that evolved into a synthesizer installation including Fairlight II and Moog 3C modular system. This led to a string of albums for Rondò Veneziano, which married both acoustic instruments and synthesizers. Thumann released his first solo album American Express in 1979. It had the hit single “Underwater”, which was later used in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV.
No, it wasn’t included in the Radio Soulwax channel in the popular game, because their channel would be included later – in Grand Theft Auto V.
Of course ‘Underwater’ was used in the Under The Covers shows, as you can see in the video above. They only used about two and a halve minutes of the song in their UTC edit.
There’s hardly any pictures or video of Thumann to be found on the web, except his record covers and this one video taken from a 1979 Italian tv show that you can see above.
He released two albums (American Express and Andromedia) and had some success with his project ‘Wonder Dog’, before his Country Lane studios moved into audio-visual production, and started producing its own telefilms.
Thumann died in 2001 at the early age of fifty.
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