"I'm sorry I'm late!" Anders Trentemøller waves as he crosses the street to Marlow & Sons, a charming little eatery on Broadway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We were supposed to meet here ten minutes ago. He has nothing to apologize for, though: I only beat him by a short while, thinking I'd missed him entirely.

We're near the hotel Anders and his girlfriend are staying. Trentemøller and his crew had been in Brooklyn two weeks earlier, playing for a sold-out crowd at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. The tour finished in Boston the night before our meeting. Instead of going home to Copenhagen to decompress, something he'd have every right to want, Trentemøller and his girlfriend decided to camp out in New York City. (He animatedly asks for show and eating recommendations.) They're clearly thrilled to be visiting—and that charge is redoubled by the circumstances. Trentemøller is becoming a rock star, straight up—someone with rising stature, a deep past and a crossover future.

What makes him easy to root for—and what comes across in person—is that the path he's taken is purely his own. His rise has been swift but steady and organic. In some ways it's the usual: a few years' worth of ever-more-assured 12-inches and remixes rising to a high peak with 2006's The Last Resort. Two CDs of "organic forest techno," per Todd Hutlock in RA's Top 100 Albums of the '00s (it placed 28th), that earned Trentemøller a high place in the techno firmament.

Yet Trentemøller grew restless. He'd played indie rock in Copenhagen before trying his hand at electronic dance, and after following Resort with The Trentemøller Chronicles, an odds-and-ends comp, he went the way of many dance artists and began his own label, In My Room. But where that scenario typically indicates a purer dance floor approach, the fact that Trentemøller named his label for a song by rock titans The Beach Boys was a signal. Into the Great Wide Yonder leaned harder and more decisively on rockier instrumentation, particularly the single "Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider Go!!!" (It's not a coincidence that Trentemøller recruited early rave-rock titan Andrew Weatherall to do a glam-stomp remix.)

That change was manifest at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Playing keyboards center-stage, Trentemøller was surrounded by Henrik Vibskov on drums, Mikael Simpson on guitar and bass, and backing singers Josephine Philip and Ina Lindgreen, AKA the duo Darkness Falls, whose "Noise on the Line" is a highlight of Trentemøller's brand-new volume of the Late Night Tales series. Even considering that DJ-mix series' wide-open, headphones-leaning remit, Trentemøller's volume is long on swooning drone-rock: Low, the Velvet Underground, Mazzy Star, the Black Angels, This Mortal Coil. (Did I mention Anders wore all black?) While Darkness Falls and fellow Danes Chants & Bells (remixed by Trentemøller) appear, for the most part this is a fan's love letter. "They're my big inspirations," he says with disarming sincerity. "It was great for me to present it on a CD."

The Music Hall show wasn't representative of Late Night Tales in any way other than that it emphasized an essential theatricality. A pair of "gates" made out of streamers added some depth to the stage—there was a lot of equipment up there, so it helped—and the lighting-from-behind enhanced the group's (and the music's) mysterioso appeal. It reminded me a little of Nine Inch Nails: straightforward, engaged, long on drama. Over olive crostini, Trentemøller is both humble and brash: strong-willed and self-effacing, all charm with a steely sense of mission. He has nothing to apologize for.

I have to say, the staging of your show reminded me a little of Nine Inch Nails. I'm curious how the show evolved.

It was very much done out of a need to do a show that has a visual twist to it. Most of the tracks are without vocals, and I'm not the one to take the microphone and say, "Hello, how are you?"

Is that just a longstanding habit?

It is, maybe because I'm actually quite shy. I don't feel like doing that. Also, I don't think it is needed. I would rather make the music talk, you know? [But] I'm trying to, with my limits, still have contact with the crowd. It's quite important not to be one of those bands that have a lot of laptops and are staring at those. The music is quite dramatic anyway. The visual side [is] quite important. It's our drama. We really wanted something that gave three-dimensional depth to the stage.

Did you look at anyone else's show and model yours on it?

No. I think we just played a lot of gigs in Europe. We all know each other from earlier; you know, the Copenhagen scene is so small, and everyone's working together with each other in different things, so it was quite natural for us to get the same feeling of moving very quickly. We didn't really think about watching other bands.

Over the last five years, the whole music scene—electronic, but also indie rock-wise and folk music and whatever—has really exploded because people started believing in their own sound. Five or ten years ago, all bands tried to sound like they were from the US or the UK. But now people are finding their own Scandinavian sound. Now, via blogs and Spotify, you can have the music come out much easier. It's easier for people to get in the charts with music that's not dictated by the major labels.

Do you think of Late Night Tales as a DJ mix or a compilation?

Both. I think of it mainly as a compilation because it's a mix of some of my favorite tracks that I have been inspired by, and also I saw it as a platform to show some new stuff, some bands from Denmark. I really wanted to make the mix be organic, in a way, so you could play it from start to end and hopefully get some kind of journey.

What kind of tweaking did you do to the tracks?

Some simple edits, because there were some places where the track maybe faded, and I thought it was a little bit boring. I looped some stuff; maybe some effects sometimes. There's a track by Mazzy Star ["Mary of Silence"]; the track actually ends just like that, without any warning. That didn't work for me, so I took the start of that track—kind of an organ pad and some weird guitar stuff —and I reversed it and mixed it in [at] the end, and put a lot of echo and effects, and faded it out. But otherwise, it's quite pure in a way.

Is that the kind of thing you'd do in a live situation?

Yeah, pretty much, because I'm using the effects on the Pioneer [DJM] 800, with the echo and stuff. Also, I'm not that good at making long beat-mixes, so I'm much more [likely] to be playing with it as a keyboard. [laughs] It's my own way of mixing.

The mix you did for XLR8R last year was kind of a rehearsal for the CD.

Many of the tracks were taken from that—not all of them, but some. The whole thing about doing compilations is getting the [rights] cleared. I had to [replace] some of the tracks I knew worked in a mix, and that went well. But clearing is quite a lot of work. The record label spent a lot of time on it. Some of the major labels were slow in getting back; some of the small labels [don't] exist anymore.

What was the timeline, compiling it?

I was asked to do this one year ago. Most of it was done on my laptop while we were touring in Europe. It was perfect; we [had] so much time on the tour bus without anything to do, so I was sitting there with my headphones, finding tracks I thought would fit well together. What I started out with was much more thinking about what kind of atmosphere I wanted. It was Late Night Tales, [so] it should be something that was a little more downtempo and deep. They knew my newest album, and the first album, and they had heard my other compilation I did [Harbour Boat Trips 01: Copenhagen], which has a similar kind of dark and mystical thing about it. I used a lot of time kind of drawing, like, curves on how the energy went up and down, because I really wanted to be dynamic, also.

"Most of the time when I compose,
I'm just sitting at my piano,
not in front of a computer."

You literally sat down with a piece of paper and a pen and drew curves?

[laughs] Yeah! [demonstrates with sweeping hand gestures] I was going up and down. It sounds a bit nerdy, but it was something that was quite important, and that I also did with my own albums. I wanted them to be—not like concept albums, but [worth] putting on from the first track and listening hopefully the whole album through. I know it's a bit old-fashioned now, because a lot of people are taking one track from a blog and one track from iTunes. It is not so common anymore, I think, to listen to albums as one thing.

Your cover of Chris Isaak's "Blue Hotel" is on the mix. Had you wanted to do that for a long time?

Yeah, for a long time. It has always been a track that I love. I heard it when I was a teenager—14 years old. I thought it could be fun to take it to another sound, in a way, because it's much more uptempo, but there's still this melancholic, kind of '50s vibe to it.

How important is theatricality to you?

I'm not thinking too much about [it], but it is something that is part of my music somehow, I think because it's all about the cinematic layers to it. Something that I always wanted music to be is, when you hear it for the fifth or sixth time, you suddenly hear new shades in it. Those layers are something that I really love. We were talking about listening to whole albums; those good albums always have these details in them. That makes them all so interesting after ten years. Hopefully my music could also do that. That's my goal.

When you say "cinematic," I know what you mean in musical terms—something widescreen with some scale to it. Are you inspired by movies?

Yeah, but not directly. Most of the time when I compose, I'm just sitting at my piano, not in front of a computer. But I'm a big fan of David Lynch. He's also working with those multilayered things. And often, he's telling one story but maybe there are more stories underneath that are not so clear. And he's good at working with his subconscious in his art; I'm very much inspired by that. And also his work with sound—sometimes his sounds really play a big part in the dialogue also. In Mulholland Dr. [2001], I don't know what the English word is, but the real sounds—?

Ambient sounds?

Exactly. If you smoke a cigarette in a movie, you can hear it. There are some elements overdone, in a way. [I like] that way of making those sounds.

Did you hear his single from earlier this year, "Good Day Today"? What did you think?

Actually, I was asked to remix it. I'm a seriously big David Lynch fan, but I really didn't like it. I was so much into the stuff he was doing with Danger Mouse. He has actually also done one other single that was much more dark and David Lynch-like.

Which producers do you find yourself gravitating toward more recently?

I think Danger Mouse really does a great job. He's good at mixing the electronic elements of hip-hop with pop rock or old school '70s rock and everything together into a very organic thing. I also listen a lot to Flying Lotus. He's a crazy man. It really comes out of the speakers.

There was a little backlash when you told Soonnight last year, "I don't see myself doing any more dance 12-inches." But the rest of the quote indicated you just wanted to focus on longer works. It wasn't a literal statement.

It was taken out of context. Then again, I was recently doing this remix of "Shades of Marble" [from Into the Great Wide Yonder], and that is pretty much a 12-inch, techy kind of thing. For me, it's not either doing this or doing that. But my focus has very much been on the album and the songwriting, and also playing live now. We have so many gigs over this summer. To be honest, my patience lasts much more in doing songwriting than in doing 12-inches for the clubs. But sometimes it's fun for me to do both.

You started your own label, In My Room. Was it because you felt that you might not be able to release the kind of glammier guitar stuff that's on Into the Great Wide Yonder on Poker Flat?

Yeah. Poker Flat is a pure kind of dance music, very electronic. It wouldn't fit their profile.

Did you feel like maybe you've exhausted purely electronic dance music for yourself as a full-time thing?

Kind of: I still do it, but not at the same scale. There was definitely something familiar that was very interesting because before that I was doing a lot of indie rock stuff that was never released. That was local, in Copenhagen, with a lot of bands. For me, it's always fun to try and challenge myself and only repeat what I know I'm good at or something. I always want to push a little bit. That takes me to different music styles, but hopefully with this, my sound is still in it.

There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to living anywhere, but have you ever tempted to relocate from Copenhagen to Berlin like so many others have?

It's actually funny that you ask. I haven't felt any need to go to Berlin or actually listen that much to the whole Berlin sound, because I think so many hipsters in Copenhagen always talk about Berlin. The whole sound, especially the minimal techno sound that came out about six years ago—every Danish house producer wanted to sound totally like that. There was so much hype on it that I really [had] enough. But it is a great city, and there [are] a lot of great things going on there. But I could actually see myself living in a city like New York or Barcelona rather than Berlin, maybe because the music scene is so much focused mostly on electronic music, and on the techno side of things. That's not how I'm feeling so much right now.