Trentemøller The Last Resort
Poker Flat Recordings, 2006
Trentemøller’s debut album plays like the soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist. It’s a dark, brooding, minimalist masterpiece that you could happily listen to on headphones with a David Lynch flick playing away silently in the corner of the room.
In fact, Lynch films were a huge influence on the producer. Those, and the works of scorers like Morricone, would actually sit next to the album more comfortably on the shelf than any of the straight-up techno Trentemøller would have been know for at the time.
Tracks like Snowflake are as fragile as their namesakes, and titles of pieces like While the Cold Winter Waiting fit the frosty soundscapes he was dreaming up in his tiny apartment studio, late at night, and quietly so as not to wake the neighbours.
“I was definitely going for something with this album that was less ‘techno’ than what I’d done in the past,” says Trentemøller. “I really wanted it to be not so beat-orientated, but to have much more focus on the melodies. And I really wanted it to have an ‘album feeling’: begin with a start, and then take people on some kind of trip.”
And over the 13 tracks he does just that, as well as really flexing his production muscles, showing you that he’s not just the guy who turns out banging remixes – he can make personal, introspective music that might actually say something about the human condition.
“It was good for me to show another side of my composing and sound making, and not just music for the dancefloor,” says Trentemøller. “I’d only been releasing 12" singles up to that point, and I was a little tired of the whole ‘club scene’ back then.”
The Last Resort was a real turning point, and something he’s still very proud of today. “It was a very personal album,” he says. “It was mainly just done by me on my little studio setup in my apartment on a laptop I bought from Aldi.
“Listening back, for the first time in about ten years, it still feels very intimate, because it was an intimate album to make. It was my soundtrack album.”