We inter­view Titus Wald­ner to find out more about his new track Palm­spree and dis­cov­er what is next for the young Ger­man producer. 

Hi there. Could you tell us about your­self and your music. And how long have you been work­ing on your music? Where and how did you train?
I am a trained clas­si­cal pianist but at an ear­ly stage I start­ed look­ing more into jazz, elec­tron­ic music and pro­duc­ing. That’s also when I added all the oth­er instru­ments to my tool­box, like gui­tars, bass, synths and drums.
I’m cur­rent­ly liv­ing in Leipzig but I start­ed the project when I lived in Stuttgart three years ago. I was writ­ing and pro­duc­ing all the time and because I had no band mem­bers around, I thought I’d do it all on my own.

Who are your influ­ences? And who are you lis­ten­ing to at the moment?
I have a lot of idols from the UK – they all do some kind of jaz­z/­soul/hip-hop. To name some of them: Jor­dan Rakei, Olivia Dean, Tom Misch – but prob­a­bly Jor­dan is my biggest influ­ence so far. At the moment, I’m enjoy­ing the new sin­gle Rosa Luft by a Leipzig based friend called Das Paradies. You should check him out!

Your new track is called Palm­spree – it’s a very cool and atmos­pher­ic track and I love the spo­ken word effect. Why did you choose to do the vocals in Eng­lish?
Some­times I can express feel­ings bet­ter by talk­ing in Eng­lish. It kin­da feels like hid­ing behind a mask because it’s not my first lan­guage. Ger­man would be too obvi­ous and kind of naked. Espe­cial­ly for this song because it is quite per­son­al. But I love switch­ing lan­guages mid song.

Do you work on your own?
I have done pret­ty much every­thing by myself in my bed­room stu­dio but I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­er musi­cians, artists and engi­neers on future projects. I have an acoustic piano set up. Some­times I can’t walk around because there’s too many synths, effects and gui­tars lying on the floor.
Actu­al­ly, just last week I checked out a stu­dio room because I’m think­ing of mov­ing to a sep­a­rate stu­dio. There are a lot of pros to hav­ing a place ded­i­cat­ed to only mak­ing music instead of dis­turb­ing your flat mates when you’re record­ing vocals or acoustic instru­ments all the time, haha.

You seem to have brought togeth­er some quite dis­parate ele­ments, a mix of jazz, elec­tron­i­ca, spo­ken word. Can you tell me more about your sound?
I am try­ing to cre­ate a blend of a lot of gen­res while keep­ing my own sound. But that usu­al­ly comes quite nat­u­ral­ly. I real­ly like how I can go into dif­fer­ent direc­tions of sound and groove but in the end, it usu­al­ly sounds like a track by Titus Wald­ner. Maybe for me a key is to use most­ly real instru­ments and ana­logue hard­ware synths all played by hand instead of MIDI. It’s a lim­i­ta­tion when it comes to sounds (because I can’t afford any synth I want) but it makes it more organ­ic and human. Also, lim­i­ta­tions are not a bad thing but can real­ly boost the cre­ative process.

I was lis­ten­ing to Stuttgart Rooftop Streams and loved the video. Can you tell us more about your videos?
I have a team of awe­some film mak­ers who are also my best friends and I’m work­ing with them on oth­er film projects. Because we’re friends, we spend a lot of our time togeth­er think­ing of cool ideas and sto­ries for videos and films. And when it comes to shoot­ing a music video, we usu­al­ly have a lot of things lying around that we want­ed to try out. It’s a very play­ful and fun process but also tough and time-con­sum­ing work. The shoot for Palm­spree was a 20hr non-stop work­ing day. Unpaid.

What direc­tion are you plan­ning to go next?
As I men­tioned ear­li­er, I’d real­ly like to col­lab­o­rate and invite musi­cians to the stu­dio to play parts in my songs. I’ve got to know a lot of great musi­cians. I’m also dream­ing of tour­ing with a live band. Right now I play solo shows. It works well and peo­ple enjoy it but as soon as I can afford a full band, I’ll go for it. Even with all the solo pro­duc­ing and play­ing live, I still pre­fer play­ing with oth­er people.

Titus Wald­ner : Face­book. Palm­spree out March 18. New EP Ball­room