Hannes Bieger on going viral with Black Hole & starting his own label

Mixing engineer, music producer and electronic music live act, Hannes Bieger explains how his most popular track, A Million Souls, came to him in a dream, why being fed up with the status quo with dance labels led him to create his own, and how new track, Black Hole went viral before he even released it.

Having put the finishing touches onto brand new single, Black Hole, mixing engineer, music producer and electronic music live act, Hannes Bieger ponders the question: how does he know when a track is truly finished?

“That's a very good question,” he muses from his (sort of) home studio in Berlin. “You could call it a home studio, because I feel at home here and I spend a lot of hours here every week, but it's a separate place,” he explains, gesturing around the room. “It's not in my house. I figured at some point that I spent more time every day in my studio than in my own bed,” he laughs.

Back to knowing when a song is complete: “It’s a great topic to talk about because basically, you don't know! But, I have to paraphrase Picasso here, who's one of my favourite painters. He was asked the same question once about how he knew when a painting was finished, and he basically said something along the lines of, ‘The painting is never finished. It's all about your decision as a painter to put the brush away.’ 

"I really like that, because you can always record one bit more, or do one tweak more, or try to refine that EQ setting a little bit better. It all has to do with experience; knowing when enough is enough.”

Widely regarded for his energetic live shows and exemplary discography, Bieger has cultivated a steady ascent through a consistently high work ethic and his inherent creative talent. His global reputation has been cemented by a slew of high-profile international shows, working closely with Carl Cox’s Awesome Soundwave, to establish his remarkable ingenuity. 

His glittering discography includes his debut LP Pele, plus an appearance in the iconic Balance mix series – the first live performer to do so – alongside a trail of chart-topping club hits, while on the road, he has performed at some of the world’s most prestigious electronic music events, including DC-1O, Ultra and Awakenings.

Bieger vividly recalls that as a six year old, he would repeatedly play his father’s The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band record, then took up the electric guitar aged 10. He was immediately intrigued by the concept of manipulating the sound of his new guitar: “Pretty much straightaway I got some Wah and Octavia pedals. When I started doing that, how it sounded was equally as important to me than what I actually played,” he reflects. “I started to get interested in sound pretty much as early on as I started to get interested in music.”

Given that he has made a name for himself in the EDM realm, Bieger reveals that a surprising source piqued his interest in electronic music:

“The later Beatles recordings,” he answers, ready to explain. “To me, that is electronic music in the sense that they started using the studio as an instrument. Think about all the different ways they manipulated John Lennon's voice – because apparently he couldn't stand the sound of his own voice and always wanted something done to it – even suggesting something as funny as hanging upside down from the studio ceiling and swinging around a microphone to get a funny sound. 

"There's so many stories about what they did and how they experimented with all these wobbly background vocals, like in Octopus's Garden where they use a fatter compressor and sidechain input with an oscillator from a synthesiser to get this wobbly sound. To me, those are the early stages of electronic music because the studio wasn't just used to capture the most pristine version of a sound, but also to manipulate them, or even create them. I wouldn't have called it electronic music at the time, but in hindsight, I think it definitely qualifies as electronic music from this point of view.”

Released in 2019, A Million Souls – a relentless, pulsing track featuring the dreamy vocals of Francesca Lombardo – is by far Bieger’s most streamed on Spotify.

“I’m mentioning all these old rock bands in this interview,” he notes with a laugh before continuing, “but Keith Richards was asked about how he writes songs, and he said he’s just putting a finger up in the air and he's hoping that something is floating along and wrapping around it – I’m paraphrasing him,” he points out.

“Sometimes you get lucky and the universe grants us something. At the time I was under pressure to come up with a follow up to Stars, which was my first release on Bedrock Records, so there was a lot of anticipation and pressure for me to do something that would also do well. The pressure was mounting. At some point, I woke up on a Monday morning, finding myself grooving to some beats in my mind in my bed and hearing a melody. 

"I sent myself an email from my bed trying to memorise what was in my mind when I woke up as best I could. Later that day, I headed to the studio, dug up the note and started producing the track, and this is what ended up being A Million Souls. I really didn't even write it myself. It came up when I was dreaming!”

Headliner points out that Paul McCartney famously came up with the melody for Yesterday in a dream; perhaps his influence over Bieger from childhood came full circle..?

“Well, I wouldn't say my name in the same sentence,” he says humbly. “I think if you're a creative, sensitive person, you're open to stuff like that happening. I'm not even sure if I could say it was a happy accident, but a number of things came together which turned out to be very much in my favour; just letting it flow is oftentimes a very good thing to do. 

"Francesca Lombardo’s contribution mustn't be underestimated at all, because this is also what makes the track special. It's still resonating with people and that's something that makes me really happy because I think the greatest goal a musician or producer can achieve is to create something that's timeless and that isn't just part of fashion that's over at some point. It stands the test of time and resonates with people.”

As head of his own label, Elektrons, Bieger utilises the outlet to channel his positive energy back into the electronic music community. Born out of a desire to create a space to explore, embrace and expand his unique sound, by founding his own label Bieger vowed to go against the grain of an industry that has become increasingly fast-paced and business-oriented to embrace an ideology that is focused on what’s really important to him: high quality music, artistry and creativity, building community, enriching the dance floor and nurturing the next generation of electronic music artists.

“I've been releasing with other labels all my musical life and it never really occurred to me as a necessity to make my own label because it's a lot of work and a lot of responsibility,” he admits. 

“Last year was special for me because I had the feeling that I was making some of the best tracks of my career, but I was struggling to get them signed with other labels. The guys running these older labels are coming from a different era where the whole thing was a lot more music-centric and not as business-centric as it may be these days. 

"The catalogue of all these labels is a lot more eclectic, and the range of different styles and genres is a lot bigger than with the new breed of labels. If you're not nailing what they are looking for as a label in terms of the genre, they won't consider it. I've been doing deep house and techno; I always have a hard time limiting myself to one style. 

"I realised that I needed to do this myself. I don't want to ever be in a situation where I create something that I feel is special (and people feel is special) and then I can't release it because I don't have an avenue to do that. I decided I need to build my own universe, so to speak, by setting up my own label, and here we are.”

Inaugurating the launch of Elektrons is Black Hole, the beguiling cut that started it all. The mesmerising track is the product of one of Beiger’s many jam sessions in his studio and sees him channelling Italian composer and music producer Giorgio Moroder, resulting in a hypnotic bassline that combines a mid-’70s proto-house disco sound with a pulsating low end. He knew it was the one to launch his own label when he posted a snippet on his socials that quickly went viral.

“I realised that this was a special track very early on, and also, it only took me a little more than a day to to make it, which also always is a good sign,” he points out. “I put a snippet of me playing it on my socials and that went absolutely viral, with more than 25 million views across all channels. I realised that this track indeed, does strike enough. But I sent it to three or four labels and they all rejected it. Everybody was reposting it on their Instagram stories and other artists asked me what kind of marketing campaign I did in order to achieve this. I said, ‘There’s no campaign; this went viral!’ It got me really excited about the track because it resonated so much with people.”

Black Hole blends a classic analogue hypnotic bassline and melodic components. Bieger recalls how the track came together: “Similar to A Million Souls, I had a chord progression, the groove and vibe in my mind, and I thought, ‘This feels really good. I'm feeling really inspired, I should head to the studio,’. 

"I skipped all the stuff I had planned to do that day and focused on producing what I had in my mind, and while working on it, it grew and grew. I had the whole arrangement pretty much finished before noon the next day.

“I did a couple adjustments later, like shortening the intro, re-recording the synth bass and the lead melody in the breakdown because I had a feeling this could be a bit more dramatic,” he furthers. “Then I did a couple more mix tweaks, but not much. It's that sculpting of the final sound picture that I did. 

"To this day, when I open the arrangement of the track, I'm sort of in awe of what I created because it's a rare thing to make something like this. It's a track where if you mute a single channel in the arrangement – it doesn't fall apart completely – but everything in there makes so much sense and brings so much to the table that every element that you take out, takes away much more than just a little element. 

"That’s always a sign that you really nailed it and that there's nothing in there that is not absolutely vital to the track. I landed inside the sweet spot with this one. It goes to show that the feeling of inspiration is very precious. If you feel inspired, it's better to follow that lead and not push it to the side, otherwise you could do whatever you had to do first and then come back to it only to realise that the feeling is gone.”

Over the last few years Bieger has transitioned from behind-the-scenes engineering to a globally-revered producer, where he has been nurturing his craft – and experimenting. His first full-length LP, Pele (named after Hawaii’s Volcano God) comprises six scintillating cuts (also all named after volcanoes) with four of the six running well over 10 minutes, almost encapsulating the organic feel of a band jamming and improvising together. Bieger explains that with his production, he embraces a 'less is more’ approach:

“Nowadays, if you start making music, you get a laptop with all the plugins and all the sample banks and all this kind of stuff, and it's an abundance of tools and sounds. There's no lack of anything, even for little or even no money at all,” he explains. 

“I'm not sure that from a creative side of things, this is such a good thing. I think artists need obstacles to grow and to develop preferences and character. I was lucky to grow up musically at the time when there was no such thing as VST instruments and plugins. Every time you wanted a new synthesiser, you had to buy it, and that meant that you couldn't use the money for something else. So it was about decisions. The accumulation of all these decisions makes you what you are as an artist.”

In the studio, he reveals that Steinberg’s Cubase is his trusty DAW of choice – he’s using the most up to date version, 13 – although his journey with the brand actually started out with Nuendo, at a time when he was more focused on creating mixdowns for other people.

“I went from Nuendo to Cubase because Cubase is a little more musician-centric,” he states, elaborating that he no longer has the need to organise thousands of channels of Foley recordings for a film recording project.

“I just wanted to make music, basically, and I couldn't be happier with Cubase. The most important feature isn't something that you can actually pinpoint, it's the overall sound quality that I like; the evenness and natural-sounding audio engine is what I like. It doesn't try to blow it up in any way, but it also doesn't take much away. I don't buy into this notion that it's transparent because it's digital, because that's wrong. 

"So many people are so strict about the differences of different analogue circuits, but then when it comes to software, they just assume that it all sounds the same because it's all digital, and that's just not the case. The biggest reason I use Cubase is because it sounds the best to me; it's a blank sheet of paper, I don't want it to have a sound, I just want it neutral. I think it is as neutral as it gets for a DAW. I don't want it to have a special sound, I want it to be invisible, sonically, and I think it is much more invisible, sonically, than the main competitors.”

Bieger explains how Cubase played a crucial role when producing Black Hole: “Cubase is basically my workbench. It's the software that I'm using to do every client mix on and it's the software that I'm using to produce all of my music. From the first MIDI notes that are put in for the bass drum, to the final mixing touches, everything happens in Cubase. 

"If you're a truck driver, you need a truck. If you’re a pilot, you need a plane, and if you're a music producer, you need a DAW. For me, that is Cubase. It's very central to my work, but it's not so much about the specific features, it's a combination of all of them. It's an environment I enjoy working in, because it allows me to do whatever I want to do with a good song, and that's just what I need,” he smiles.