German trance disc jockey ATB hits Dallas on Friday for the first time in his career. Considered one of Europe’s biggest names in house and trance music, ATB has worked with the likes of Sarah Brightman, Olive and Moby. His arrival in Dallas marks a growing trend of big-name European DJs scheduling a stop in Dallas while touring the United States. ATB attributes this to the growing audience in America for European dance music.
“It’s always been hard to get in with dance music in the United States,” ATB said, “but the audience has opened up.”
Unlike Germany and most of Europe where different internationally famous DJs play gigs every weekend, Americans don’t have the opportunity to see live the DJs they listen to on CD. For ATB, this makes his visits across the Atlantic more significant than his resident shows in Germany.
“For German people, it’s normal to go see me spin. People here [in America] are really thankful,” he said.
ATB, born Andre Tannenberger in 1973, got his first taste of trance music listening to DJ Thomas Kukula spin at the Tarm Center in Bochum, Germany, where he is resident DJ today. Kukula, impressed with Tannenberger’s demo tapes, helped produce Tannenberger’s first three tracks under the name Sequential One in 1993. Tannenberger took his proceeds from those releases and invested in a home studio of his own, producing his own music under the name ATB and drawing heavily from early 1990s ambient music.
“My first record was Enigma and stuff like this, always ambient,” he said. “My influences now are still ambient, but I try to make it more danceable.”
On his new album Dedicated, ATB serves up a mellow offering of trance music, re-mixing Olive’s popular house hit “You’re Not Alone” into a bite-size pop tart. His most passionate tracks are unsurprisingly “Hero,” written by his long-time collaborator Roberta, and “I Wanna Cry,” both written in response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
“I think everybody has their own perspective about what happened. As musicians, we have the opportunity to write down and record our feelings,” he said.
Smoother than his first album Movin’ Melodies and more emotional than Two Worlds, Dedicated will no doubt spawn two or three international hits for the German superstar. ATB prides himself on reinventing his sound with each release, and this album is no exception.
“I try to do everything different, I always want to do something new,” he said. “This is a personal goal for me.”
