About Der Dritte Raum

Andreas Krüger, aka Der Dritte Raum, is the man behind some of the most stirring electronic music of the past thirty years. But he'd rather not talk about himself. "The least important thing in all I do is myself," he says. "It's about the music." But of course there would be no epic anthems like "Hale Bopp" nor transcendent tunes like "Electric Friends" without his creativity, vision, and technical virtuosity which has been honed by his lifelong fascination with sound. The son of musical parents, Andreas grew up immersed in music. He began to study the piano as a child but tired of rigid instructions learning to play precisely he stopped taking lessons and instead exploring the secrets of compositions from Bach to Pink Floyd. His main love, though, was electronics and physics. "I never thought I'd be a musician," he says with a chuckle. "I was the boy who built my own circuits, my own AM radio." This fascination with electronics helped spark his love for pioneering synth bands like Human League and Kraftwerk. When a friend lent him a synthesizer, Andreas and his brother set it up in their basement, along with a drum machine and organ, and proceeded to "make a lot of noise." He was studying physics at the time but music absorbed more and more of his energy. In the following years he played keyboards in different bands, worked on sound installations and created soundtracks for theater. 1990 he and a friend opened a small recordingstudio in his hometown Göttingen. Suddenly, being a professional musician or recording engineer seemed realistic. About the same time Andreas got in contact with the newly emerging Tekkno scene in Hamburg and Berlin. For the first time, he saw his two great loves, music and technology, wedded to create something unique. "It was music without a standard arrangement, music without vocals," he explains. "Our New Wave and EBM projects always had a standard intro, bridge, verses, etc. Techno was totally new." With typical fervour, in 1992 Andreas dropped his other projects to concentrate on new aliases like „Dr. Dna“ and „ Der Dritte Raum“. Much to the delight of electronic music fans, he has been doing so, with surpassing brilliance, ever since. The marriage of Andreas's deep musical background and peerless technical skills birthed a unique sound that runs like a high-tensile wire through his prolific output as Der Dritte Raum. The discography with almost 400 works, released on labels like Cocoon, Harthouse, Virgin EMI, Katermukke, Shitkatapult and many more demonstrates, Andreas has never lost his fascination with pushing the boundaries of creating sounds, beats and Hooklines. Der Dritte Raum has changed over the time, but without losing it´s distinctiveness. „I don´t care about styles and genres,“ he says. „it´s all about technology, love and art.“