E-Mail This Article to a Friend Minimal man Michael Mayer brings the Kompakt sound to Boston BY TONY WARE
	Related Links Kompakt Records' official Web site

The German city of Köln (Cologne) has a rich history of electro-acoustic experimental composition dating back to the microtonal magnetic-tape loops Karlheinz Stockhausen introduced in the ’50s. And it’s remained a place where cooking up tweaked sounds is almost a mainstream pursuit. The cooking metaphor applies particularly to the sounds that have come out of the sonic kitchen of Kompakt Records over the past decade, and from the studio of label co-head Michael Mayer, who comes to Boston to DJ at An Tua Nua this Tuesday.

"Food and music have a lot in common for me," Mayer explains over the phone from Köln, "especially when you prepare either yourself. Both transport me, absorb all my attention into what’s going on in the pan. With both, I prefer to improvise than use a proven recipe. And with both, I prefer to take fewer ingredients than more. What fascinates me the most is that each person, if several people are given the exact same ingredients, will create something completely different with either food or music."

As with Stockhausen, minimalism is a big part of the Kompakt æsthetic. One of the label’s acts, Superpitcher, helped popularize the schaffel beat, which is techno’s cooled-down, minimalist answer to glam-rocked big beat and is used to good effect on Mayer’s own single "Amabile." Kompakt is also home to what’s been dubbed "microhouse," a spatial, skeletal, yet melody-flecked version of tech house, and in fact microhouse is how most of the label’s recent output is being categorized.

As Kompakt’s highest-profile DJ, Mayer is an ambassador of opulent reductionism, of charmed, Kraftwerk-devised "motorik." And with the release of Touch, his new album of original productions, he’s taken the opportunity to provide his own blueprint for the Kompakt æsthetic. It’s an album full of tracks that are hypnotic but not quite trance ("Touch"), squelchy but not acidic ("Privat"), and metronomic yet not overly cold ("Lovefood"). They’re conveyed by both compressed, mechanized clicks and mesmerizing chicks — well, their vocals, at least. And Mayer has come up with his own signifier for Kompakt’s approachable experimentation: "pop ambient." "We have to clear the meaning of the word ‘pop.’ It comes from ‘popular music,’ and we grew up with popular music, especially high-profile bands like ABC and Scritti Politti. What we want to try and do is rescue a bit of the glamorous surface, the beauty of ’80s pop — the shimmering surface — into ambient [recordings]. It sounds like an old friend, but you can’t tell why. So we mean the term in an abstract way.

"For the album, I was listening to lots of old records from my youth, and I tried to distill an essence from these records to see if something in a record I used to like but don’t now could still be used — just a mood, or the reason why I liked it. To get as close as possible to that point, not as a structural sample but as the answer to ‘Why?’ ‘What used to attract me?’ This was something I didn’t think I could do as easily in a studio away from home, so Touch was the last bigger production I did in my apartment studio, which is cozy and chaotic. I squeezed everything out of this room."

Although nostalgia is integral to Mayer’s approach, it goes deeper than merely recycling the familiar. There’s a reflective and even melancholy sensibility to his recordings that’s tied into the way he assimilates the past. "I think pretty much all over the planet people are looking for better times, for something to improve. I think you can find melancholy much more often than happiness. That’s why I’m not attracted to happy house, things like that, because they try to assimilate something I don’t actually see in the eyes of people.

"Melancholy touches people in a much more real place and spurs interaction. Success is when people feel you evoke their emotions. With techno, when you have melancholic feelings, you always have the opportunity to manipulate someone from a melancholic state to a totally euphoric state. It is the goal when you leave the club, exhausted from going through many different states but leaving in a better mood than when you entered."

Michael Mayer spins this Tuesday, March 1, at An Tua Nua, 835 Beacon Street in Boston; call (617) 262-2121.