ATB
On a date night in 1998, André Tanneberger detoured his guest through his home studio in Bochum, switched on a guitar effect, and played a melody meant to last a few minutes before the cinema. "I think she was bored after 15 minutes," he later admitted, "but I had the melody, so I was like, I have to work on this." He saved it under the working title "9pm," finished it two days later expecting no label would want "this crazy melody," and watched it top the UK charts — the template for two decades of ATB records built from one synthesized theme, patiently unspooled rather than chopped into verse and chorus. Tanneberger, born in East German Freiberg before his family moved west, had learned that patience years earlier from the electronic composers he grew up worshipping.
His older brother is responsible: sometime in the 1980s he came home with a CD player and a Jean-Michel Jarre album, put it on, and a school-age André Tanneberger sat up straight. "What the hell is this?" he remembers thinking. "I love that ambient kind of stuff — in those days it wasn't ambient, it was just electronic relaxation music." The feeling stuck; he's since credited Jarre's "spherical sounds" with pushing him to marry pretty melody to a dance pulse rather than pick one. Decades later, Jarre hired him to remix his own single "Vintage" — "for me, it's special," Tanneberger said of it.
listen forPlay Jarre's own "Vintage," from 2007's Téo & Téa, then Tanneberger's "ATB Lounge Remix" of that same track, a job Jarre commissioned him for. The floating, high synth theme survives untouched; what changes is the frame around it, eased into a slower, warmer pulse built from the same patient, one-idea architecture Tanneberger brought to "9 PM" a decade earlier — this time in direct service to the composer who taught it to him.
Tanneberger names Michael Cretu in the same breath as Jarre nearly every time he's asked about his roots — "these spherical sounds really inspired me," he said of Cretu's project Enigma, crediting it alongside Jarre for the pull toward "dance beats with beautiful melodies and harmonies" instead of choosing one side. The admiration became collaboration: on 2000's Two Worlds he built a track around a piece of Cretu's own music and gave him a co-writer's credit, titling it "Enigmatic Encounter." "I'm really glad that I've had the opportunity to work with some of these guys that inspired me," he said, "like Enigma's Michael Cretu."
listen forEnigma's 1990 breakthrough "Sadeness (Part I)" rides a slow, insistent pulse under a hushed, chant-like vocal wash — the moody, reverberant atmosphere Cretu became known for. On "Enigmatic Encounter," the track ATB built around that same music and credited to Cretu as co-writer, the tempo doubles into a club pulse but the hushed, reverberant pad stays underneath it, the meeting point between Tanneberger's dancefloor instincts and Cretu's slow-burn atmosphere.