Artist Review

Musician: ATB
Country/Region: Germany/Europe
Genre(s): Trance (vocal/ambient/club), ambient/new age, instrumental
Recommended songs: “Ecstacy” featuring Tiff Lacey, “Renegade” featuring Heather Nova, “Desperate Religion” featuring Karen Ires, “Here With Me” featuring Tiff Lacey, “Alcarda”, “Collides With Beauty” featuring Madelin Zero, “Let You Go” featuring Roberta Harrison (from 2002’s “Dedicated”); “Let You Go (reworked)” featuring Jan Lochel (from 2005’s “Seven Years”)
Recommended albums: 2004’s “No Silence”; 2007’s “Trilogy”

The genre of trance is abused by musicians and critics alike, and often the artists themselves; executed poorly, the same electronic beats layered over the same pulsing, hypnotic drum beat used by every producer alive to the point that one’s mind simply implodes from lack of variety. Bad dance music, bad mixing– bad everything, really.

But I think it is mostly due to the proliferation of uncreative “pioneers” of trance who have reached international success– DJ Tiesto comes to mind, who has indeed pioneered a certain style, but I personally am not fond of his music, which seems to me to be repetitive and can’t hold my attention for more than two minutes. It’s good, certainly, but it’s not re-playable.

Nor do vocals always improve a song– Ian Van Dahl’s “Castles in the Sky” was grating to hear, and despite its international success, it fixed the stereotype in the public’s mind that vocal trance consists of one or two phrases looped repeatedly. While this was indeed a common phenomenon in 1990’s trance, it requires quite the dose of drugs to genuinely enjoy this.

So here I present my unashamed bias towards DJ Andre Tanneberger, most commonly known as ATB; a pioneer of the trance genre in his own right as well as the artist who has appeared most commonly in my favorite songs list, he has managed to craft high-quality melodies that not only defy the restrictions of genre, but transcend them. Song descriptions for three of my favorite tracks are in the Songs page of this blog, but almost all of his work from 2002’s “Dedicated” album onward is gold, to me; through his seven albums, ATB has shown marked growth and development as a producer and musician. Indeed, his “Trilogy” double-album contains a disc composed entirely of ambient instrumentals without a single trance beat or vocal contribution, and has proven that producing trance does not mean breaking from traditional instrumentals and composition.