Journey Into Sounds: Best Fit speaks to Michael Mayer

-

On the 20th of August 1519, the great Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in search of a westward route to the fabled Spice Islands. A generation younger than Columbus, Magellan’s was an age of exploration, of voyages of discovery, whose wondrous tales would soon feed into a dawning proto-science fiction of trips to the moon and far flung utopias. Magellan’s journey would make him the first to cross the Pacific, and ultimately became the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe (though Magellan himself would be dead before his fleet returned to Spain). This year, just a little short of half a millennium later, producer, label boss and superstar DJ, Michael Mayer sets sail upon waves of sound for his own far-flung desert shore, an island he has named ‘Mantasy’.

Google the word and you will find references to an old Stephen Colbert routine about mundane male fantasies. Mayer has other things in mind. “I didn’t choose the word,” he insists. “It chose me. It was suddenly on my tongue. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t know what it means. And I still don’t exactly know what it means. But, while working on the album, Mantasy became this point of escape for me.” And what an escape. From the rich, wave-like swells of album opener ‘Sully’, to the hedonistic, neon cityscape of closer ‘Good Times’ via ‘Baumhaus’’s filtered birdsong and the oriental-sounding sample which kicks off ‘Roses’, Mantasy is a journey of a record, a veritable voyage of discovery in sound.

“Mantasy stands for an island or a continent that has been undiscovered so far which I would discover doing my work on the album,” claims Mayer. “The making of the album was a journey to that.” So it may come as less of a surprise than it might have done that Mayer claims the two main influences behind the album were not classic tracks from Detroit or recent club smashes fresh out of Ibiza; not musical at all in fact, but literary. “Two books definitely had a big impact on the album,” he admits. One was David Toop’s ambient odyssey, Ocean of Sound, and the other was Stefan Zweig’s Conqueror of the Seas, a biography of Ferdinand Magellan.

“I think these books go very well together,” he says. “They’re both about journeys. One is a journey to the inside, to a discovery of sounds. The other one is an actual journey of discovery. But they both delivered the framework for the work on the album: let go, sail with the wind, don’t think too much, try to not plan too many things, just let it happen and allow myself as much freedom as possible.” Strange as it may seem to be discussing literature with a man you might have thought more at home behind the decks at Fabric than down your local library, for Mayer music always needs “a narrative element, some story that’s told within the track, within the set, within a record. I think that storytelling approach in techno is something that got much stronger in me over the past years.”

The narrative concept carries over from the music onto the sleeve design, by Mayer’s partner in running the Kompakt label, Wolfgang Voigt. Though best known for his music, mostly made under the name Gas and released on Kompakt as well as labels such as Raster-Noton, Mille Plateaux, and Profan, Voigt, Mayer tells me, is also a “great visual artist”. Normally a painter, Voigt has been moving more and more into digital art recently.

Mayer was wowed by some of his recent pieces and asked him to create what has turned out to be his first sleeve design for another artist. “In the end it was a collaboration,” Mayer explains. “I delivered samples – I wanted to take the artwork in the direction of old sea maps, like that aesthetic to do with the special kind of colours from old books – then he remixed them digitally. And this corresponds very well with the music: analogue source or sample, maybe an analogue instrument, and I would transform it digitally into something else.’

Despite numerous highly successful mix albums and 12″s, it’s been eight years since Mayer’s last studio album, the acclaimed Touch. And though he insists that his approach to making tracks has not changed much in the intervening years – rather “it ripened” – the period has seen a broadening of Mayer’s already diverse tastes, embracing American singer-songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker, film composers like Morricone and Mancini, and most significantly, the weird exotica of the Sublime Frequencies label.

Run since 2003 by the Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop, Sublime Frequencies is part record label, part “collective of explorers” operating on the fringes of “extra-geography and soulful experience” and releasing bizarre limited edition CDs of folk and pop music from Burma, Syria, Mali, Palestine and other locales usually more renowned for their strained relationships with the U.S. State Department than for their cultural exports.

While he admits he’s “not so much into the purely functional club music,” despite his broadened listening palette, Mayer insists that he’s not about to move away from club music and become a ‘serious’ composer. “I can’t get it out of my skin,” he says. “I’ll always make club music – but sometimes the kind of club music that is played at the very beginning or the very end of the night.”

From the start, Mayer’s label Kompakt had eclectic, even utopian aspirations. It was a universalist project, a banner to unite all the tribes behind. “We always wanted to release any kind of music we liked on one label. As opposed to the time before Kompakt when we had sub-labels for every genre and things were much more separate.” To this day, the label is known for its sense of family, renowned for the communal meals all the employees share (“good, healthy food,” Mayer informs me) and the friendly welcome strangers receive at the Kompakt record shop. “I think it’s a very nice working environment,” Mayer confirms.

It all started back in 1993 with the opening of a shop named Delirium. A twenty year old Mayer had moved to Cologne two years before. Desperate to “get the fuck out of the Black Forest” where he grew up, he had come to Cologne based on a single weekend’s impression of a certain easygoing affability to the city’s residents. “I instantly liked it so much,” he recalls. “The way people approached me was so much more friendly than Berlin at the time. I knew Berlin quite well already, and I knew that I didn’t want to move there.” But since arriving the young DJ had grown disenchanted with the record shops in town and hungry for something new.

So when Woflgang Voigt and Jurgen Paape opened Delirium, Mayer was “the first customer, eagerly waiting in front of the door.” But disappointment met him inside, “their selection was a catastrophe. I started yelling at them. That’s how we became friends. Two weeks later, I was working there.” Looking back, he says the decision to invest his grandmother’s inheritance money in the label in order to become a partner in the new label was, “probably the best thing that I ever did in my life.”

Next year, Kompakt will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a showcase tour offering the gamut of the label’s roster “in full glory,” from bands to DJs to ambient sets, along with what Mayer promises will be some “some very special releases”. In the meantime, Mayer is all set to take Mantasy on the road, living out his own ‘mantasy’ (in perhaps more of Colbert’s sense) of visiting all his “favourite clubs” and playing sets that last “all night long”. For Mayer the eternal clubkid, this is going to be like, “an early Christmas gift. I love to play long sets and I know all of these places very well so it’s gonna be great.”

Mantasy is available now through Kompakt and Michael Mayer will perform at the following live dates:

November
09 – Kolmikulma Club Oy, Helsinki
23 – Wire, Leeds
24 – The Williamson Tunnels, Liverpool
30 – The Prince, Melbourne, Australia

December
01 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
07 – The Wall, Tapei
08 – Unit, Tokyo
21 – Robert Johnson, Offenbach
22 – Weetamix, Geneva
28 – Culture Box, Copenhagen
29 – Rex Club, Paris

February
12 – Flex, Vienna
15 – Sub Club, Glasgow
16 – Fabric, London