JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH GREGOR TRESHER

Gregor Tresher began his career as a DJ in Frankfurt in the early ‘90s, and is still going strong today, regularly performing to thousands of revelers everywhere from Berlin to New Zealand. His secret? A relentless focus on melody and timbre. The German DJ and producer reflects on the changes he’s seen in the electronic music scene over the decades and reveals why he just can’t get enough of the circular nature of EDM trends.

bY Alice Gus t nosfa

“There was never really an alternative or any plan B – this was the only thing I ever wanted to do, and I never did anything else to be honest,” says Tresher from his home studio in Frankfurt, where he’s psyching himself up for his upcoming world tour, which will see him play across Europe, India, New Zealand and Australia, to name a few of the territories he’ll be hitting.

Will he be using those long haul flights to work on new tracks, Headliner asks?

“I can’t really work on flights, especially with modern music,” he admits. “I cannot work on music outside of my studio, to be honest! So no, I never get any work done on a flight. It’s just binge-watching series and trying to get some sleep!”

Inspired by his brother’s love of synth pop in the mid ‘80s, as a boy Tresher discovered Depeche Mode, New Order, Joy Division and Yazoo, and it lit a fire in him.

“This record by Depeche Mode really changed my life,” he reflects nostalgically. “That was my first touch with electronic music in general, I’d say. When I became a teenager, I went to my first techno club in 1990, which was Omen in Frankfurt, which was a pretty legendary club. That night really changed a lot for me and was the starting point when I thought, ‘Yeah, this might be for me!”

He had the bug, and keen to experience the hypnotic thrill of EDM amongst a sea of other music lovers, soon became a regular club-goer. In ‘93, he started exploring music production at home, becoming what he calls a “bedroom DJ”, which soon led to his first ever set outside the confines of his room later that year. He had a hard road ahead, but never gave up:

“I had my first club gig in 1993, which was not a paid gig,” he points out with a smile. “Then I got around 20 Deutschmarks. It took me years and years until I could make a living out of it. Up until the early 2000s I was struggling to make a living off it.”

It paid off. Following two criticallyacclaimed albums credited to his Sniper Mode alias, Tresher broke through as a producer under his real name via his 2005 releases Still and Neon . In 2008, his track A Thousand Nights was the year’s best-selling techno track on Beatport, and introduced Tresher to a larger audience.

“I had Sniper Mode and a couple of projects with different names,” he reflects on his retired aliases. “At some point, it made sense to use my real name, because it’s you. It’s different. If your real name is on the record, it’s really you and you’re not hiding behind some pseudonym. I think you’re more focused on the music and what you want to say with the music when your real name is on there. That was one of the main reasons I changed it and I never looked back after that.”

Ever modest, Tresher admits that he never expected A Thousand Nights to blow up like it did.

“Sometimes in the studio, you have these moments that are very rare where you think, ‘Oh, this might be something special’ and I had it with that track, for sure. But you can never really tell if people are going to like it or not. I thought people would like it, but I wouldn’t have thought that it would stand the test of time. It’s on Spotify and it’s still my most played track,” he points out. “Still now, it’s rising in numbers.”

With one huge track still raking in the listens after all these years, is Tresher ever tempted (or encouraged) to recreate the success with a similar formula?

“No. I think capturing the magic is the right description for what I’m trying to do,” he answers thoughtfully. “It’s not about the song particularly, it’s more about capturing the moment and the magic if it’s in the room. I spewnd a lot of time in this studio, and there are days where there’s just nothing happening. When I was younger, I thought this was wasted time, and it sucks and that I would never come up with anything new again. But the longer you do this, the more you realize that you need to spend time making music to generate these moments that might end up as something good. So I’m trying to capture the magic – I’m not trying to repeat any formula or anything, because that’s not good for creativity.”

In the trend-driven universe of electronic dance music, Tresher is the rare artist who transcends such cycles. As someone who has been working on electronic music since the ‘90s, he says he’s seen every trend come and go:

“It’s kind of changing in circles,” he muses, “everything’s coming back. Electronic dance music was a music revolution. Every 10 years, you had a revolution: you had the guitar, then you had your electric guitar, then you had the synthesizer, then you had a drum machine, and with every technological step, there was a new sound that was introduced, like rock and roll, punk, grunge, synth pop, and then eventually, electronic dance music. That was the last real revolution. After the ‘90s, there were only variations of what had been there before.

“Techno electronic music has been around for 30 years now, and it’s all moving in circles. Sometimes the BPM gets a bit quicker and then they slow down again, and then certain sounds are involved and others aren’t, but it’s all moving in circles,” he reaffirms. “It changes too of course, it’s not going back to what it was – it’s just finding a new form, but the tools are kind of the same. I’m not trying to move with the trends, but I tend to produce music that I would like to play out as a DJ as well. Obviously, as a DJ, you get the beats per minute change during your career; sometimes it’s slower, and now we’re in a time where everybody plays a little bit faster again. So that influences my production a little bit, but I’m not trying to follow any trends at all,” he asserts.

Tresher’s remix history includes working on tracks for artists including Moby, Sven Väth, Laurent Garnier and Extrawelt, and in another full circle moment, Depeche Mode, when he worked on their 2013 single, Soothe My Soul – taken from their 13th studio album, Delta Machine

“I was a huge fan!” he enthuses, thinking back to his childhood discovery of their music. “When I was eight years old I had posters of them in my room, so it was surreal to be asked to do a remix for them maybe 30 years later. I have all their albums, I have been to many, many shows of theirs, I really have been a huge fan, so to do the remix was a dream come true. I was so excited to even get the parts and to work with the original recordings. I even handed in two remixes because I was so excited to work on it! I made one harder, like a techno mix that was released on

Tresher’s introduction to electronic music production saw him experimenting with sounds on a friend’s Atari ST, and despite the circular trends of the EDM world, one piece of kit has been a constant for him since the mid ‘90s: Steinberg’s Cubase.

“Yeah, I’ve been using it for decades,” he points out. “There was a very early version of Cubase and that was my first DAW. It worked really naturally for me; I mean, I learned everything on it, from how MIDI works to how a sequencer works – everything, basically! The software evolved over time and I stuck with it.”

He suddenly recalls that this isn’t quite true – he did briefly try out a DAW from another manufacturer, but Cubase had already made its mark on him.

“I switched to another big DAW for one year in the early 2000s,” he recalls, “but no good music came out of it from me in the end. So I switched back to Cubase and I really felt at home right away. I really liked the pitch shifting and time shifting functions, you can work with audio files really quickly, and you don’t have to do long calculations. That was the main reason why I moved back to it, and it’s evolved from that as well, obviously. The way to use audio files is perfect for me.

“It’s my sequencer of choice and probably will be for as long as I make music,” he adds. “I just feel like home there. It’s natural. I like my workflow in it and I am fast with it now, because I know it pretty well. It is way better for people that make the music that I do. There’s other software that is probably more for people that record instruments – even though there are many that use Cubase as well – and I get that, but for electronic music, it’s the best sequencer. It’s the best DAW for me. I would just say it’s my secret of choice.”

World tour aside, Tresher shares that he also has two upcoming releases on Cocoon and Neumatik (techno DJ and producer Petar Dundov’s label) coming out this year.

“I’m really excited about these,” he grins. “There’s going to be a new 12 inch on Cocoon late summer called Black Halo. It’s a good record and it really stands out for me. Then there’s a four track EP with my buddy, Petar Dundov from Croatia. We’ve been working together for 10 years now, and have been releasing many, many 12 inches. It’s called Palantir.”

STEINBERG.NET

GREGORTRESHER.COM