Trentemøller - An electronic kaleidoscope

From Vordingborg, with heart

The man who outstrips the machine, the heart that overtakes the mind, substance that prevails over form, passion that overturns rules and definitions, feeling that chips away at reason. The triumph of sensuality, warmth and colour in an age when electronic music, now more than ever, has grown increasingly radical and monochrome, leaning toward the white of abstraction, the grey of the street or the black of night. The pink of flesh caressed but never pushed to sweat, the blue of a clear sky, the brightest hues and the softest ones: all together within well-defined boundaries, yet ready to overlap and create new, unpredictable shades, guided by spontaneity and in spite of calculations, planning and measurements. Humanity taking control, the synthesizer and keyboard taming the laptop in the studio, the live concert uprooting the dj-set. A kaleidoscope ready to open up to the most disparate worlds, tracing a line made of vibrations, beats and melodies - discontinuous and full of unpredictable changes of direction - that joins electronic music and pop with stops along the way in deep house, the minimal universe, singer-songwriter territory, wave, psychedelia and contemporary trends. The kaleidoscope of electronic crossover, the electronic crossover of Anders Trentemøller.

The anti-star

I was lucky, thinking back on it. Hype suddenly came my way and I got shoved into the minimal-techno box. I've spent years trying to escape from that, and personally I've always tried to escape from hype in general too. I don't feel comfortable being the center of attention.

He introduces himself by surname, as if to maintain a distance that is in fact a deliberate intention to use music as the only channel between himself and the outside world. He says little about himself, has no persona and plays no part. In his DJ sets he neither fidgets at the console nor stands still; in concerts he shares the stage with at least three collaborators, presenting them as co-stars rather than claiming the spotlight for himself. His isn't the kind of face that sticks in your mind, that draws you in with beauty or fascinates with mystery, that oozes rebellious spirit or basks in angelic features. Almost everyone knows his name, but few could name one of his tracks or albums. Anders Trentemøller is the anti-star par excellence, the anti-persona, someone who seems to work hard precisely so as not to stand out for anything other than his music, so as not to create even the faintest kind of image that might taint the purity of his sound or condition his creative search in any way. A search that is about as unassuming and unambitious as one could imagine: it's pure craftsmanship, a weave of passions, memories, suggestions, images and taste. All of it slipping free of any a priori sense of time, landing now on the latest electronic trend, now in retro universes: everything masterfully stitched together without a seam in sight.

And that's precisely why Trentemøller's musical persona remains so hard to pin down: he isn't a DJ, yet his main talent is exactly that of charting trajectories able to touch a myriad of universes, even wildly distant ones, and find coherence and exquisite taste among them. He isn't a producer, even though his tracks are electronic creations through and through, and among the most interesting and forward-looking of his generation, crafted nonetheless with the organic approach of a genuine composer. He isn't a musician, because his music is, more than anything, a work of blending worlds, of tracing and research, of personal variation on themes that belong to the public domain. He doesn't fully match any of these labels, yet he embodies a bit of all of them, as if he himself wanted to be their common denominator. And so it is that we know and infer as much from his music as we actually know little about the man himself.

We know he was born in Vordingborg, a Danish town rather far from the capital Copenhagen, and grew up in that Scandinavia which was the last fertile frontier for house music in Europe, particularly in its most languid, dreamlike forms. Exactly the forms from which young Anders's adventure sets off, in 2003, and from which he will soon show himself ready to drift away, giving rise to a question that the constant, increasingly surprising evolutions of his sound will keep feeding: where does Anders Trentemøller really come from? What follows will attempt to find a possible answer.

Under the Radar, Beyond the Depths

I never cared much about the music industry or music history, music is simply and purely my passion. I've been making music since I was four years old and I intend to keep going until I'm at least 75.

As already mentioned, we know remarkably little about young Anders. You need luck and some digging to find his name on a record by a teenage rock band, Flow, released by the mysterious Instant Records in 1996, which he will never publicly reference. Trentemøller takes his first real steps in the world of music a year later, when he crosses paths with fellow Dane DJ T.O.M., aka Tom Von Rosen, with whom he creates the first Danish live act to cross national borders. The two first make a name for themselves as Trigbag, then, briefly, as Action Men: just long enough to get noticed for their curious geographical origin and to slip a few early productions onto now-untraceable samplers. But the imp from Vordingborg feels far from satisfied: producing club music without the freedom of expression he craves just isn't for him. His drive and creative restlessness lead him, three years after his debut, to go solo, leaving behind his partner in crime, who will fade into obscurity within a few months. Few will remember this brief episode outside (or even inside) their small home country: among them is Jay Denes, at the time a rising talent and today one of the spiritual fathers of electronic lounge music, a rather lightweight offshoot of deep house. Owner of Naked Music Recordings, the producer is struck by Trentemøller's taste and promptly secures him the first record deal of his career.

Meanwhile, the future juggler of electronic crossover goes through the most classic kind of transitional phase: disheartened by the dead end of his first experience, he sets aside most of his equipment and devotes himself entirely to another lifelong passion of his: travel. During a stay in London, he finds himself almost by chance wandering around Bristol: it's 2002, and the trip-hop generation has by now almost entirely abandoned its hometown, but the air, the record shops and the streets still carry the deep scent of marijuana and the taste for samples left behind by Massive Attack and company since the days of the Wild Bunch.

Trentemøller lets himself be swept away, drawn into that world of dark, hypnotic tunnels: back home, his musical taste undergoes its first, decisive shift. The result is the little-known EP bearing his own name, marking his recording debut and taking Scandinavia's typically cold, impersonal deep house and warming it up with new harmonic suggestions and a dub sensibility that had until then been foreign to any such production. All in just two tracks, two long odysseys: the relaxed, lulling "Le Champagne" and the more obsessive, restless "In Progress", in which a taste for bass music - another London inheritance - surfaces for the first time.

Along the same lines, between 2004 and 2005 come two more EPs, the solo releases Beta Boy and Physical Fraction, and the single "8 Timer/25 Timer", put out under the name Viltland alongside Krede Pedersen and Torsten Jacobsen, two longtime friends who will never step outside Denmark's borders. Still under the radar, but Trentemøller's career has found its launchpad.

Microsonic Subtractions and Minimal Solutions

People seem to really like throwing music into categories. Throwing, as in tossing a dirty cloth into the 'whites' or 'colors' basket for the washing machine. I don't like it at all, I find it so... boring. Doing the laundry at home is already boring enough for me.

When the then Danish DJ-producer decides to give his career a new direction, opting for a first step toward more elaborate worlds, the year is 2005. It's the year dubstep is crowned as a language on the rise: "Kingstown" comes out, among the expressive peaks of the duo Kode9/Spaceape, Burial debuts with the first hints of a possible way "beyond", grime explodes with the compilation "Run The Road" curated by 679 Recordings, and Skream begins laying down the first coordinates for the future mainstream spillover of the classic aesthetic.

But it's also the year of the handover between minimal and electro, soon to merge with the melodic drive of trance that had by then overflowed everywhere, and of house's consequent decline as the primary form of electronic music for mass consumption. Even in Northern Europe, where lounge bars keep (and will keep) drawing their crowds spinning pre-packaged mixes of deep house and chill-out first, then dub-house, the change at the top has had its effect. The process will take a couple of years to complete, when in 2007 Kylie Minogue and her "X" will seal the definitive union between chart pop and the new electro-trance hybrid, just before the explosion of the likes of David Guetta and Bob Sinclar.

That's precisely why the turn Trentemøller gives his sound starting in the second half of that year cannot be read as a move toward the aesthetic "of the moment". If anything, it's a regatta sailed against the current, only marginally tied to the minimal universe in the strict sense (the one running from Robert Hood to the second phase of Richie Hawtin) and much closer to its experimental counter-step: so-called microhouse. Despite the many labels tossed around rather haphazardly, the layering and colorful hypnosis of his music have little to do with the voracious sweat of the techno hammer, and just as little with the bass tangles long dear to the underground forms of British electronic music (garage and its various offshoots). The decisive event is the meeting between an Anders increasingly keen to look beyond and the legendary Steve Bug, the human embodiment of the common ground between deep house and the sonic universe of microsound. A world born and developed within post-glitch experimental electronics, which spilled over via Raster-Noton into techno's so-called abstract strand, before eventually flowing into the "indie" side of the minimal aesthetic. A 12" by the Dane (Beta Boy, for the record) ends up in Steve's hands and strikes him so deeply that he immediately signs it to his label, Poker Flat.

In this new musical discourse, Trentemøller applies for the first time in a decisive way the approach destined to become his trademark: making emotion prevail over form is a very arduous mission in a field as intrinsically bare and cold as microhouse. Precisely for this reason, the effervescent transition of Sunstroke, where metallic sparks and fetid tangles irreparably sully the ethereal echoes of the past, is a fundamental link towards the genuine miracle of its B-side "Minimal Fox", namely plastic that takes on the flavour of wood and the warmth of fire, minimal that becomes deep and deep that is stripped down to its bare essentials. A genuine mantra, a manifesto of the new direction taken by the Vordingborg elf, who presses on undeterred, churning out another four 12"s within six months: the A-side of Polar Shift brings the discourse to its sharpest peak, beginning to revolve around those raw, biting constructions which, through its thousand evolutions, his sound will never entirely lose along the way, while its B-side, "Chameleon", digs a tunnel that plunges to abyssal depths, managing to render those darknesses with impressive clarity. Serenetti and Kink, meanwhile, emphasise the organic traits of his constructions, generating a sonic spectrum already capable of displaying its impressive breadth.

Contamination, synthesis and consecration

I really like working with contrasts, combining pure, cold electronic sounds with warm melodies often of analogue origin. Working with moods and atmospheres is something truly wonderful, and decidedly more stimulating than dwelling on form, which is why there are always so many layers in my music.

Surprisingly, despite a string of releases that were anything but easy or immediately accessible, Trentemøller's name sets off in 2006 on a dazzling rise. Industry insiders, helped also by the guarantee of the Poker Flat imprint, flock en masse towards this young Scandinavian with the unruly black mane and the "ordinary" face, who seems so skilled at making even his sound constructions seem "ordinary" — complex, intricate and deep, yet never devoid of a musical skin that makes them accessible to everyone. Thus, the first half of 2006 turns the once-unknown Anders into one of the most sought-after remixers in Europe: Moby, Knife, Robyn, Sharon Phillips and Röyksopp are just some of the top-tier names who decide to entrust tracks from their catalogue to his skilled hands. And it is precisely the latter who are indirectly the first to be responsible for Trentemøller's definitive consecration: it is in fact with the remix of their "What Else Is There?", able to launch the track itself into club charts across Europe and beyond, that the Dane begins carving out a place among the greats of contemporary electronic music. A hypnotic mantra that lays bare his way of understanding bass music and smoothing crystalline cycles with the warmth of melody.

Meanwhile, Poker Flat keeps his name warm and primes him for the breakthrough by releasing the single "Always Something Better" and the EP Nam Nam, delicious previews of a main course due to arrive within a few months.

"Specialising" in remixes is the keystone of the Dane's career: his style, already open to contamination in itself, meets in the practice of reconstructing other people's work the traits and specifics of expressions even very distant from his own. And the attentive Danish elf never misses the chance to draw something from it, to make his own a part of those languages that celebrated colleagues decide to put in front of him. Past passions resurface, such as his love for rock (he will always prefer to call it "indie"), pop, singer-songwriter music and, more generally, all those musical idioms able to stay clear of single-minded interpretations. Crossover becomes the keyword, understood not as a musical style but as a genuine way of seeing and (not) framing the musical universe, whose only necessary credential and "category" of distinction becomes the ability to communicate. The time is ripe, and between one remix and another, Trentemøller begins planning a long-form work and gathering handfuls of tracks ("songs", to use a word particularly dear to him), which, placed in sequence, would in all likelihood serve as a perfect reconstruction of the gradual broadening of his stylistic spectrum. Many of these will never see the light of day, others will remain in the drawer only to be picked up again later. Most will be revisited months later and collected, together with a selection of his remixes, in an unmissable compilation. A strict selection, meanwhile, will flow — alongside tracks released on the Poker Flat 12"s and their B-sides — into his debut album.

The Last Resort is the litmus test of everything Trentemøller has represented from his debut through to 2006. A minimal electronic record, one of the finest minimal electronic records of all time, the most human minimal electronic record ever composed, the most colourful and polyglot minimal electronic record ever produced. The evolution, even compared to the EPs of the Poker Flat period — ideally brought to a close precisely with this album — is stellar and decisive, a step perhaps unexpected but entirely in line with the potential already shown in the Dane's first three years of career. The long-playing format allows, for the first time, the heterogeneous spectrum of Trentemøller's music to develop and extend in its entirety, taking for the first time the clear shape of a stylistic kaleidoscope: muted colours, yet with sharply defined edges, mix and combine in an incredible variety of interchangeable figures capable of combining to form a myriad of different puzzles.

The starting point is the already-released music box of "Always Something Better", namely a masterful essay in microsound straddling ambient and minimal, influenced by the sharp abstract blades of Alva Noto and crowned by the scratches of his friend DJ T.O.M., called in for the occasion to take part in the great consecration party. A play of lukewarm effusions and glacial stings combined in a thoroughly physical balance, which reappears in an "Evil Dub" that drags Moritz Von Oswald's tunnels into a slow-motion vortex, using flashes and shadows as mirrors of emotions and visions.

Dub is one of Anders's new passions, and the arctic excursion of "Nightwalker" — this time casting an extra glance at the deep suggestions of his origins — and the underwater dive of "Snowflake", almost a bow to Loscil, prove it. "Take Me Into Your Skin", placed at the opening, moves from the same suggestions towards a sensational hybrid of melancholy, vibrations and spasms: it is Trentemøller's first masterpiece, a crescendo that spreads its wings wide and lays down the coordinates for what will become the common denominator of his electronic crossover. The extra element, acquired above all through contact with musical forms often far removed from electronic music in the common sense, is an approach that makes organicism a creed: there is thus room too for limpid touches of glockenspiel in the icy sheet of "While The Cold Winter Waiting", for celesta and strings in the astral ambient of "Like Two Stranger" (a veritable lesson for the early Jon Hopkins), and for Mikael Simpson's guitar in the dirty black hole of the martial "The Very Last Resort". His club past resurfaces in a new form, reaching for the stars in an "Into The Trees" that could have been lifted from Yello, in the gripping bass overflow of "Vamp" and in the pitch-black, Deadbeat-style tar of "Chameleon", the only passage of pure, shadowy dub-techno.

The moody suspension of the closing pair "Moan"-"Miss You", caught between dispersal and nostalgia, brings down the curtain on what is one of the most extraordinary, far-sighted, evocative, polyglot, personal and underrated works of electronic music of the new millennium.

The horizon of electronic crossover

I've never wanted to make club music, and I don't see myself as part of the electronic scene. Maybe I fit more within the indie scene, but I don't think that label is entirely accurate either. My patience runs out much faster recording 12"s for clubs than it does composing songs.

The Trentemøller who leaves The Last Resort behind is a producer still firmly attached to the electronic idiom and capable of coining and travelling some of its most original and unprecedented variations. The emotional factor, already enough to make the difference between his debut work and the output of many contemporaries, has in fact made any kind of comparison with earlier figures in the same sonic universes impossible: Anders is a songwriter of electronic music, a painter before he is a sculptor or an architect, an artist in the most classic sense of the term, even though thoroughly accustomed to flirting with experimental sonic universes. He is no longer, if indeed he ever truly was, a disc jockey or a club-music producer: his sound constructions are, for the moment, geared instead towards contemplative listening through a good stereo system, so ill-suited to live reproduction that no tour follows the album's release. Instead, the Dane takes part in sporadic DJ sets in which he revisits sonic fragments from his past, while continuing in the meantime his important and prolific activity as a remixer.

Far more aware of his potential and steered towards a more defined sonic path, he begins working on something that has been his dream since his earliest days: founding his own record label. It will all take shape in the In My Room project, which will take a full three years to develop and give rise to the label of the same name. Meanwhile, his deal with Poker Flat is shifted onto Steve Bug's other label, Audiomatique, which takes charge of collecting the best of Trentemøller's remixes along with some of the tracks left out of The Last Resort.

The result is The Trentemøller Chronicles, namely a focus on the coldest, most minimal and club-oriented side of the Dane's production, a retrospective necessary to understand, in two stages, the step that led to the album's evolution. Among the gems it contains are the remixes of Röyksopp's "What Else Is There?", Moby's "Go" and Knife's "We Share Our Mothers' Health", plus a series of gems from the pre-Poker Flat EPs and a merciless remix of "Always Something Better".

The compilation actually turns out to be a double-edged sword: it surprisingly manages to push the Dane's name into clubs across Europe, but it also forces him into a genuine, unexpected tour de force of live shows to assert his far more complex identity. It's during one of these, held at Roskilde Festival, that the short Live In Concert Ep is recorded, a document both of the artist's live skill and of the complexity of performing the tracks from The Last Resort on stage.

Three years pass, and Trentemøller's name — who after this run of shows turns down any offer of a club or discotheque dj-set — effectively vanishes from the dance circuit, closing out his experience in the world of clubbing with a couple of 12"s – Rykketid and African People – and one last substantial attempt to launch his friend Torsten Jacobsen (Buda) with the Gamma split. Beyond that, he's heard from only through his steady, prolific output of remixes: but while his audience steadily shrinks, the esteem of colleagues from the most disparate musical worlds keeps growing.

Up until the release of The Last Resort, it had mainly been figures from the electronic savannah who entrusted the Dane with reworks of their tracks; but after the critical success of his dazzling debut – named album of the year by Germany's Groove Mag and France's Trax – the requests doubled, opening up in particular to names from the indie-pop world (and beyond): for Anders, it's a dream come true, a chance to finally "go back to his roots" in music. And it's precisely through remixes like "No You Girls" by Franz Ferdinand, "White Flash" by Modeselektor in cahoots with Thom Yorke, "Raincoats" by Efterklang, "Wrong" by Depeche Mode and "Beach" by Mew that the juggler folds new colored shapes into his kaleidoscope, combining them with his own original sounds to form an early sketch of electronic crossover.

From there to a second full-length chapter, it's a short step. And so Into The Great Wide Yonder arrives as a surprise, with no grand announcements or heavy promotion, immediately revealing itself for what it is: a transitional record. A transition from polyglot minimal to electronic crossover, from synthetic stalactites to organic-electric contamination, from the instrumental to the song form complete with a vocalist, from marine depths to earthly darkness, from Poker Flat to his own In My Room. But to grasp the distance separating the album from the Dane's instrumental past, you only need a quick glance at the credits: where The Last Resort showcased Trentemøller as the do-it-all producer, here he hides behind keyboards and synths to make room for a short but significant list of collaborators. These include fellow Danes Mikael Simpson on bass and Jakob Høyer on drums and guitar, violinist Davide Rossi (Black Submarine) and a series of voices from the indie world, including Fyfe Dangerfield of Guillemots, Solveig Sandnes of Lovebites, Josephine Philip and the ever-faithful Marie Fisker, who from this point on will follow him both in the studio and on stage. And it's the latter who takes the lead on "Sycamore Feeling", the dark-ballad chosen as the album's lead single: this time the terrain covered is a lush, hermetic dark-wave, unapologetically built on a pop-leaning song form but with entirely new twists and an unprecedented elegance.

"…Even If You're With Another Girl" follows the same line, a trip-hop bow to storytelling Goldfrapp, standing out for an unprecedented sensuality. A peak that is topped in extremis by the sublime energy of "Past The Beginning Of The End", a minimal, liquid bed around which, in a slow crescendo, orbit Simpson's shoegaze-tinged electric guitar, guest Dorit Chrysler's theremin and the strictly live-recorded backing vocals of Nanna Øland Fabricius. On "Neverglade", thanks above all to Sune Martin's mandolin, you can almost hear Unto Ashes going into hibernation amid synthetic sighs, while the closing "Tide" starts out dark and atonal before giving itself over to a liberating, melancholic dream-pop. If organic textures were already a recognizable trait within the minimal wounds of his past, here we're faced with a soundscape that is minimal only in the occasional sonic choice, sitting instead at the crossroads between twilight-faced electronica and a refined pop deliberately close to the indie sphere. But the transition also runs through direct links with the sounds of the recent past, entrusted to the cinematic ouverture of "The Mash And The Fury", which joins deep bass to swarms of guitars, and to the spectral march of "Haxan", whose direct descendants are the melodic apotheosis of "Shades Of Marble" and the adrenaline-fuelled massacre of "Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider Go!", a flight of bass, drums and analogue pounding at the speed of light.

With the same element of surprise that marked its birth, Into The Great Wide Yonder climbs within a few weeks to number two on Denmark's best-selling albums chart, and lands in the top 50 in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland too. It's the first time Trentemøller's music breaks through to a wider audience, and before long he attains the status of a true idol at home while drawing the attention, across Europe, of both the more refined electronic crowd and indie-circuit enthusiasts. The machinery of electronic crossover has delivered its first major result, even if it still needs some oiling: the album's only flaw is that it gathers together such varied worlds without quite binding them under enough common denominators.

From the ecstasy of success to the twilight of maturity

Most of the time when I write music I sit at the piano and play, without computers or electronics. With 'Lost' that's exactly what I did: I wanted to make a simple record. It's true that it's a very layered work, but the songs are decidedly simple, they can be performed with just guitar and piano, and the melody is almost always the main focus.

I've never been interested in making music that was only about having a nice shape.

What follows in Trentemøller's career after Into The Great Wide Yonder is the most classic, exhilarating kind of ascent. Although he chooses not to go after the mainstream masses, the former Vordingborg kid now finds himself under the spotlight of a critical establishment increasingly amazed by his ability to cross-pollinate without ever becoming definable, and of an audience that finds in his music a perfect synthesis of refined complexity and accessibility. Following the album's release, he sets off on a long European tour to promote it, and its more direct songs fit far better than those of The Last Resort into the live dimension he has by now definitively embraced: that of the concert. For this very reason, the band that had already played on the record is kept on and expanded with Lisbet Fritze on guitar and Henrik Vibskov on drums. The success of the shows is even more staggering than that of the album being promoted, and it reaches its peak on the tour's final date, in his native Copenhagen: around two hundred thousand people turn out to witness a jaw-dropping show, full of special effects clearly inspired by the Jarre model, recorded for a release that would only see the light three years later, as Live In Copenaghen.

The following year, the realization of just how successful he'd become leads the Dane to try to tie together all the threads he'd been pursuing over time: and so, in 2011, we get an ambitious, almost megalomaniac mix for LateNightTales, a new synth-pop single that's decidedly retro in nature and deliberately catchy ("My Dreams", once again in Goldfrapp territory, but this time the Goldfrapp of "Supernature"), and an essential Reworked/Remixed, a second collection of his best remixes containing all the key moments needed to understand the polyglot evolution of his sound between 2006 and 2010.

But just when the euphoric explosion seems to be dangerously taking over, he makes the decision that acts as the true conduit toward artistic maturity: in 2012, Trentemøller wraps up his tour and temporarily disappears from the scene, shutting himself away in the studio to work on his third album. No leaks filter out of the In My Room studio, no previews are granted, until, in early 2013, Anders himself resurfaces in a video playing back a reel: it's the partial demo of a kind of suspended, almost entirely acoustic lullaby, cradled by the unmistakable voice of Mimi Parker. But it's the whole warm cocoon wrapping those barely three minutes that sets up extremely high expectations and the promise of a new possible evolution. That is exactly what Lost (2013) represents in every respect, guiding the follow-up to Into The Great Wide Yonder toward compositional and artistic maturity, dismantling its precarious, unripe balance to open up to a further expansion of the sonic spectrum, and tying it all together under a single unifying thread: the undifferentiated triumph of emotion. The kaleidoscope thus comes to hold an even more complex and extensive range of colors and shapes: anyone expecting the now-fully-fledged musician's maturation to bring a synthesis of the ideas he'd explored over time will be disappointed to find instead an unthinkable further deepening of them, evident already in the guest cameos, refreshed both in lineup and prestige, and in the simultaneous renewal of the electronic foundations themselves, scrubbed clean of his predecessor's darkness and sent reaching toward the present day.

"The Dream" opens the record, and calling it astonishing is pure understatement: a sweet, languid twilight ballad with Low in full force lending their slow-motion suggestions, a fresh breeze but also a lulling torpor woven between piercing touches and swelling flashes of light. A "dream" that fades ideally into the pastoral dance of "Gravity", a northwest passage somewhere near a Devendra Banhart infected by electrodes – not by chance, on vocals is Jana Hunter in her Lower Dens guise – before condensing into the patterns of the irresistible lead single "Never Stop Running", a stroll through post-dubstep liquefactions christened by Jonny Pierce of Drums.

On a lusher path, the ever-present Marie Fisker leads us into territory that would have made the fortune of late-period Massive Attack, in the analogue sunset of "Candy Tongue", whose night is identified further on in the lunar lullaby of "Come Undone", which once again looks back to the sensuality of American Nineties sounds, this time making room for Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead. Delicacy is the primary virtue of this (yet another) "new" Trentemøller, who shines just as brightly when he chooses to flaunt the more muscular sides of his sound: this comes in the form of spectral mantras, like the metallic march of "Still On Fire", the post-industrial hypnosis of "Morphine" and the dark ebm of "Deceive", made in partnership with Sune Rose Wagner, one half of Raveonettes, but also in the form of taut, high-speed rides such as the technoid arabesque of "Constantinople" and the ravenous sprint of "River Of Life", in cahoots with the shoegaze shades of Ghost Society. And if that weren't enough, we still haven't mentioned the record's two true masterpieces: the fleeting "Trails", which opens oppressively before unfurling into melodic tangles à la Four Tet, and the evanescent farewell of "Hazed", a lucid dream made of shadows, chiaroscuro, glimmers and layers in harmonic intermittence.

At the tail end of the record, hidden behind a few minutes of silence, a piano detonated straight out of a haunted house seems to want to revive the initial mystery: where does this curious maverick of today's electronic music really come from? A question that certainly can't be answered by a few biographical notes, the article just concluded, and a fascinating interview about influences and passions. A question to which, perhaps, it's right that there be no answer, so that the spell of which Lost represents today's peak can go on amazing us, again and again, for years to come.

In 2016, the Danish DJ and producer confirmed in Fixion his firm resolve not to settle into the comfort zone represented by everything he'd already done well in the past, choosing instead to continue the slow transmutation from his early minimal techno towards decadent darkwave atmospheres. And so here comes a "Never Fade" that could easily be mistaken for an outtake from the Cure's "Faith" era, or from Editors' "In This Light And On This Evening". Post-punk architectures permeate much of Fixion's twelve tracks, both in the instrumentals with their oppressive atmospheres (the excellent "Sinus" and "November") and in the sung tracks, whose developments are unmistakably dark (the dramatic "Spinning", the weaker "Redefine", the opening "One Eye Open").

But roots matter, so there's no shortage of dancefloor tourbillons ("Phoenicia") and New Order-style electropop ("Circuits"), useful for injecting the right dose of rhythm and dynamics, before the album closes the books on the placid landscapes of "Where The Shadows Fall". Worth highlighting is the charismatic vocal presence of Jehnny Beth on "River In Me" and "Complicated" - a fitting thank-you for the excellent mixing the ever more multifaceted Trentemoller provided on Savages' "Adore Life".

Trentemoller's new approach, aimed at pairing more properly electronic tracks with others more conventionally in rock-band mode, is confirmed on the following Obverse, released in 2019. The quality remains at a very high level, and once again there are numerous guests ennobling the recordings.

Among the standout names are Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, who lends her voice to the opening "Cold Comfort", and Jennylee of Warpaint, who sings on "Try A Little". The other vocal contributions come from Lina Tullgren ("In The Garden") and Lisbet Fritze ("Blue September", "One Last Kiss To Remember").

The move towards his beloved dark sounds is definitively completed with Memoria, an album that in 2022 cements the Danish musician's newfound love for sounds such as shoegaze, dream-pop and new wave, with which he frames his refined electronic elegance. The opener "Veil Of White" is a calling card with no way back: it marks the definitive entry into the chiaroscuro of more introspective sounds, aided by the ethereal vocals of his trusted Lisbet Fritze.

In terms of overall proportion, instrumental tracks numerically outweigh the sung ones, and while in the episodes where Fritze's voice smooths out the jagged edges of the electronic structures (the new new wave à la Editors of "No More Kissing In The Rain", the post-punk lodged between Cure and Joy Division of "All Too Soon", and the eccentric ambient-shoegaze pairing of "In The Gloaming"), it's in the tracks without vocal input that the magical essence of the new Trentemøller truly emerges.

The album moves with nonchalance from frenetic darkwave ("Dead Or Alive") to dives into motorik sequences ("When The Sun Explodes"), from forays into imposing new wave ("Darklands") to industrial-techno moments ("Glow"), arriving at antithetical combinations shot through with drone and new age veins ("Linger). What the Vordingborg composer offers is a dark yet auspicious universe, the perfect key to tracing one's own memories through sumptuous electronics, faded guitars, blurred vocals and wavering percussion - all ingredients usually configured to describe desolation and melancholy, but in this case used to give the horizon a palette rich in colour and hope.

In 2024, Dreamweaver sees the Dane continuing along the path of his most recent works, offering an album in which the dominant emotional charge injected into a dark substratum, where dream-pop, shoegaze and darkwave effectively interweave, is still the star of the show.

Unlike Memoria, this is essentially a song-based album, with only one instrumental track. It's the ethereal voice of DÌSA that takes centre stage, the perfect lead for catchy electropop structures (above all the title track), wave-driven pulls heavily indebted to Smith and co. - just listen to the keyboards on "Behind My Eyes", borrowed from "Disintegration", to grasp the homage - and dreamy drifts that bring us back to the oneiric sweetness of Lynch's Julee Cruise ("Hollow").

The ten tracks reveal the full range of the Danish musician's musical passions - the Joy Division influence is evident on the propulsive "In A Storm" - and offer a few unexpected openings, such as the acoustic take on the opener "A Different Light". The quality of the songwriting remains consistently high, but overall this is a less disruptive work, one that tends to maintain a uniform tone leaning towards his beloved dark sounds, and is almost entirely free of those jagged incursions that gave its predecessor such a dazzling sonic richness.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Fixion", "Obverse"), Cristiano Orlando ("Memoria") and Peppe Trotta ("Dreamweaver").

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