Interview: Trentemoller by Chris Downton

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Trentemoller freestyle Sejersen pic

Over the past decade, Copenhagen-based electronic producer Anders Trentemoller has managed to attain an enviable position only held by a few other big names associated with the electronic / dance scene, one where he’s been able to headline huge festivals and remix the likes of Benny Benassi and Moby, without losing the respect of a fanbase more aligned with leftfield techno / house and more fractured electronics. It’s a position that resulted partially from his continual subversion of the ‘big room’ track aesthetic with more unpredictable and jagged details (see his remix of The Knife’s ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’, and also from the fact that Trentemoller chooses to play a considerably different gambit with his own albums.

Indeed, when Trentemoller’s debut solo album ‘The Last Resort’s emerged on Poker Flat in 2006, some listeners were taken aback by the downbeat and cinematic nature of many of its tracks, expecting instead a collection packed with floorfillers. If anything, Trentemoller’s intent became even clearer when viewed in the context of his second album ‘Into The Wide Yonder’, which saw David Lynch-ian vintage guitars and eerily beautiful female vocals making appearances amongst a darkly cinematic collection still geared around his fundamentally electronic base. Three years on from that aforementioned collection, Trentemoller’s newly-released third album ‘Lost’s sees the ever-restless producer pushing his productions even more towards indie / New Wave-influenced territory, whilst also drawing upon an impressive cast of guest vocalists that includes Low’s Mimi Parker, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino and The Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner.

After initially explaining to Anders that as a longtime listener I didn’t really find the increased presence of New Wave / indie influences on ‘Lost’s as much of a surprise as some other journalists, I ask whether he considers this latest album to be a natural progression from the territory he was exploring on ‘Into The Wide Yonder.’ “Of course it is different compared to my first album (The Last Resort)”, he responds. “But there are still also some similarities because there is definitely still this kind of electronic feel to it, but then there is also this, you know the guitar-driven part and then this kind of noisy stuff. So for me it is just part of a natural development, and I actually think it is quite natural that I don’t really sound the same as I did ten years ago because things have also changed in my life and hopefully the music also reflects that.”

Given that several of the guest collaborators on ‘Lost’s such as Low and Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes previously on appeared on Trentemoller’s indie-centric ‘Copenhagen Sessions’ mix release, I also ask Anders whether this latest album represented an opportunity for him to work with some of his favourite artists. “On one hand it was definitely that, but it was actually more that the songs that I was writing kind of demanded that!”, he laughs. “Pretty early in the process, for example when I started to write the song ‘The Dream’, when I started doing those chords and also the idea for the melody I was hearing Mimi Parker’s voice in my head. So I actually finished that track as an instrumental and afterwards I tried to contact her. So it was definitely a kind of nerve-wracking thing to actually hope that Mimi Parker would like this song and like to work further on it. In fact all of the vocalists that are on the album are there because of the songs that I wrote, so it was not something that I really planned before starting on the album. It wasn’t like I thought ‘now I going to make album with all of my heroes’, and somehow I would try to squeeze them into the album.”

Trentemoller freestyle Sejersen pic2

I also point out that unlike many other electronic albums featuring guest vocalists, on ‘Lost’s there’s frequently the sense of the collaboration taking both artists into a space considerably divergent from both of their respective separate backhistories, rather than simply being some ‘Trentemoller featuring…’ type experience. “I’m very happy that you hear it that way”, replies Anders. “That was really something that I was trying to achieve because for me it was really important that those tracks didn’t just sound like me with a guest artist trying to adapt into my sound. So because I was having those specific vocalists in mind when I was writing the songs, that also made it quite easier for them to come up with ideas for the song and also made it easier for me to get them to appear on the album, because they could hear that the track was written for their specific voice.”

“It was also totally open for the vocalist to come up with their own melodies to sing, and it was totally up to the artists to write their own lyrics because I really think that you get a much more pure and honest result if the artist is actually singing his or her own words,” he adds. “Also, I’m a pretty bad writer, so really it wouldn’t work for me if I tried to dictate bad lyrics that I tried to write myself,” he laughs. “These are artists that I really admire and also trust because I know their background and also their way of singing, and their way of writing lyrics, and so it was quite easy for me to lose the self-control and then just trust these artists.”

Given that Anders has recently occupied the opening support slot on several of the European / UK dates on Depeche Mode’s gargantuan ‘Delta Machine’ tour, I’m curious to find out more about his new live show, and also what it was like playing such huge venues. “For me that was a crazy experience because I grew up with Depeche Mode, they were really the soundtrack to my teens, so it was a really big thing for me to suddenly be asked,” he responds, the enthusiasm immediately evident in his voice. “They were actually asking me to finish this album and I was sitting in the studio mixing it and having a really busy time. But then suddenly this email came in that Depeche Mode wanted us to warm up for them, and then of course you couldn’t say no!,” he laughs.
“So in the daytime I was finishing this album, and then in the nighttime I was getting the band together to rehearse also stuff from the new album, because I wanted to not only play our old albums but also try some of the new stuff out. One of the wilder things was, after we played our first warm up gig at the London O2 Arena, Martin Gore came to me after the show and said that he was a huge fan of my music and really knew tracks from my albums and the mix CDs that I had done. So that was pretty crazy because I was supposed to be the fan of him!”

Trentemoller pic

“It’s funny because we haven’t really been playing any big electronic or dance festivals because I see my music as being a bit more indie or rock and roll these days, but we’ve still been playing some big festivals like Roskilde and Glastonbury,” continues Anders. “Our biggest challenge was actually to figure out how we could play these vocal tracks without the artists, because obviously it’s not possible to bring all the artists from the album with us on tour. So a big challenge for me and also Marie Fisker, who’s the vocalist appearing on the current tour with the live band was to take those songs and then try to kind of tear them apart and build them back up again around her voice so the melodies fitted her way of singing. I really didn’t her to try to copy what the other singers were doing because she has such a beautiful voice herself, so we much more tried to do new versions. It was really like remixing your own stuff for the live stage. I was really happy that I focused so much on writing really good chord progressions when making the album, because it’s actually possible to play most of the songs on the album just with an acoustic guitar and a piano.”

Given the densely cinematic nature of many of ‘Lost’s tracks and also realising that he’s previously scored an independent Danish film before, in parting I ask Anders whether he’s keen to explore film soundtrack work any further in the future. “The thing that I found out doing this Danish soundtrack was that it takes a lot of time and a lot of work”, he explains almost ruefully. “Because I’m so busy also playing my own stuff I thought that it simply took up too much time for me because the focus was suddenly not on my own music. It was something that I thought was fun to do, but it also meant that like nine months of my life went into just working on this film music. It was an experience to see how other directors use my music in their movies, for example Alamadovar used one of my tracks, and Oliver Stone also used one of my tracks in his latest movie, so that is always fun to see how other artists can be inspired by the music that you make, and then use the music in a different way that you would have never thought about when you were writing it.”

Trentemoller’s ‘Lost’s is available now through In My Room

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A dastardly man with too much music and too little time on his hands

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