UNER Finds His Music in the Silence Between the Notes

There are electronic music producers who work from the dancefloor up, and there are those who work from something older and deeper. UNER — the Catalonian producer whose records on Diynamic, Cadenza and Get Physical have made him one of the most important names in a new generation of Spanish electronic music — belongs firmly to the second category. Classical training, a lifelong search for personal sound, and an unusual source of inspiration: silence itself. We spoke to him about roots, restraint, and why the best work in the world also demands the most sacrifice.

When UNER talks about influence, his first instinct is resistance. "I always try to not have big influences," he says — and then immediately concedes the impossibility of it. Because the influence is there, running beneath everything, and it has nothing to do with clubs or record labels or the electronic music world that now claims him as one of its own.

It is classical music. All of it, in all its forms. Present since childhood, still the strongest current in his work. The harmonic sensibility, the architectural approach to sound, the search for something that feels inevitable rather than constructed — these are not electronic music instincts. They are classical ones, transplanted.

The names he reaches for when pressed on electronic influences are telling in the same way. Laurent Garnier, Orbital, Depeche Mode — artists who, in their different ways, all carry a weight and seriousness that goes beyond the functional demands of the dancefloor. Not music designed to fill a room, but music with somewhere of its own to go.

And then, quietly, the most interesting answer: "I also find inspiration in the silence."

For a producer whose tracks — Raw Sweat, Bassboot, Pallene, Cocoua — have become reference points for a generation of DJs, whose music plays regularly in the sets of Luciano, Carl Cox and Laurent Garnier, whose name is on the doors of Watergate Berlin and Space Ibiza season after season — the turn to silence is not affectation. It is the logical endpoint of a classical training that taught him, before anything else, that what you leave out is as important as what you put in.

The live audiovisual concept he launched in 2011 makes the same argument in a different register. State-of-the-art software and hardware, iPads and midi keyboards — but deployed not for spectacle, for exploration. A way of presenting the most personal, considered side of the work in a format that demands full attention rather than simply rewarding movement.

This is the through-line: a producer who trained musically before he trained as a DJ, who cares about harmony as a physical pleasure, who built a reputation not on the speed of his rise but on the consistency of his sound. The labels that carry his work — Diynamic, Cadenza, Get Physical, Defected — are not random. They are each, in their own way, homes for music that takes itself seriously.

When asked what he would say to the next generation of electronic music artists, UNER doesn't reach for anything complicated.

"Keep working hard to reach your goals. This is the best work in the world, and the most special, but it requires a lot of effort and sacrifice. Keep the good work and fight for your dreams."

It is the simplest thing he says in the entire conversation — and perhaps the most honest. From someone whose sound is built on restraint and precision, the directness of it lands differently. No shortcuts. No formulas. Just the work, and the silence around it, and what emerges from both.

UNER is a DJ, producer and live performer based in Catalonia, Spain. His catalogue is available across all major platforms. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.