“It took me a long time to finish it, almost two years,” Niemerski says of the record. “I started over again because I wasn’t happy with what was coming out, and I literally just finished it last week. It has just been mastered, and I’m hoping it will be out by late September.”
If that’s not enough to get you excited, the list of collaborators certainly will. “I worked with quite a few different musicians and singers on it,” Niemerski says, “and I guess now I can say their names. I worked with Nile Rodgers on two songs, which was very exciting for me. I worked with Stuart Price, also known as Jacques Lu Cont, on one track. Jamie Lidell is singing on one track. There’s also a singer from Australia, known as Fiora. She has lived in Berlin for about four years, and when we became friends, we planned to do a song together, but we ended up doing six or seven, and she is a huge part of the album now. I worked with some really incredible people, that’s for sure.”
The legendary Nile Rodgers, who also appears on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, is quite a catch, and I ask how the collaboration came about. “I sent him a Facebook message last year,” Niemerski says, “and I didn’t expect there to be any reply, but he told me he was interested in hearing my demos. I started to worry, because I didn’t hear back for a while, but then out of the blue, I had a message saying that he was going to be playing in Hamburg and asking if I wanted to collaborate on something.” Rodgers ended up playing guitar on two tracks. “He told me stories about old times, how they recorded stuff,” Niemerski says. “He’s a very humble, down-to-Earth kind of guy.”
Many have said that Tensnake tracks draw on the sounds of ‘90s house music, although Niemerski doesn’t like to limit himself to any one set of references. “I approach it differently each time,” he says. “Sometimes I start with a beat and wrap everything around it, but most of the time, it’s a certain mood I want to express. I never sit down and say, ‘Okay, I want to make a ‘90s-sounding house track,” he laughs. “My approach is that I listen to songs or sounds that I’ve recorded and try to imagine what I can change or make better. Inspiration comes from everywhere these days – I travel a lot, and I get to meet a lot of people and hear a lot of tracks. It can strike at any time.”
If there’s one thing that unites Tensnake’s tracks, it’s a sense of uplift and euphoria – even the moodier ones, like the beautiful and spooky Congolal, can bring on a great rush of endorphins. “That’s definitely not conscious,” he tells me. “I would say those happier elements are just in my nature a little bit! I think I just prefer happy melodies and a certain vibe.”
He ponders the track Congolala for a second. “For me, it’s not necessarily happy,” he says. “It’s bordering happiness, but if you’re sad, it could be a sad song. It is for me, maybe not for other people. If I had to choose, I would always choose happy music. It’s easy to play a couple of sad chords and to create a sad song than it is to create a happy song that doesn’t sound cheesy.”
It’s often the case that the best club tracks, while not necessarily ‘happy’ in their overall sound or style, can transport you somewhere different, and take you away from the realities of whatever you’re feeling in that particular moment. Niemerski agrees that this is the essence of a really great electronic track, and that if he strives for anything in his music, it’s for a sense of escape.
“That’s always what I try to reach when I’m producing,” he says. “I want the songs to have the potential to take me out of the room – I mean, my studio is a windowless room with no sun and lots of electronic gear sitting around, and if the song can take me away somewhere different, then I think it’s good and it works.”
Niemerski will be bringing Tensnake to Australia soon, for a series of shows that bring together elements of DJ sets and live performance. “My production skills have always been my main focus,” he says. “When I started getting bookings, I would play live sets with just my own songs, but I found that I didn’t have enough new material, so I started doing edits of other people’s music and putting that in there.”
Over time, the set became a hybrid of the two. “I’m not at the point where I have huge production or anything,” he continues, “so the show is laptop-based, but I’m bringing Fiora with me to sing. I’m going to present material from my new album for the very first time – I’m probably most excited about that.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
