Michael Mayer's gift for the definitive statement has made him a worthy figurehead for microhouse. Sure, it helps that he owns Kompakt Records, but his expertly constructed mixes are so authoritative and lean that they read like blue-sky distillations of a point in time; he's one of few DJs who can communicate the full-bodied landscape of a scene and meditate on its past and future possibilities in the span of 70 minutes.
But despite being responsible for two such landmark mixes in 2002's Immer and 2003's Fabric 13, Mayer's original material has heretofore been consigned to 12-inches. Lost amidst the glut of pre-holiday releases last December, Touch is the full-length debut he has reportedly labored over for years. Dissatified with the album's many previous incarnations, Mayer recorded this final version over a three-week burst last summer; with its light, August atmospheres and simple, elementary sounds, Touch communicates the natural environment in which it was made. It also sounds like it was hatched in a relatively short timeframe, which is no bad thing-- where Mayer's studio mixes have been assembled with a painstakingly precise, scissor-cut aesthetic, Touch generally feels rounder, more casual and certainly more homemade.
Of the eight tracks, only one-- the wispy "Lovefood"-- contains vocals. The rest range from the by-the-books techno of atmosphere-setting opener "Touch" to the proggy (translation: epic and undanceable) no man's land of the album centrepiece "Slowfood". But, a few highlights notwithstanding (both "Heiden" and the previously released "Amabile" ooze slow-cooked energy), Touch never achieves liftoff, nor does it ever really threaten to. Instead, it just kind of blissfully floats around in its own self-contained environment, content to prettily fizzle out into an unceremonious anti-climax.
Mixed a few months prior, Speicher 2 comprises tracks mostly culled from Kompakt Extra's Speicher series, and shows Mayer the clinician at his best. With a small pool of strong source material to select from, Mayer's job is admittedly a lot easier here. As ever, he reveals himself to be a master of momentum, easing into the mix with dark rumblers like Wighnomy Brothers' "Wurz + Blosse", Wolfgang Voigt's "Nachschub", and the bubbling techno of his own brilliant "X". Thirty minutes down the line, he's dutifully moved on to bangers like Freiland's prickly "Jens Harke Mix", the schaffel stomp of Fuschsbau's "Null/Eins", and Naum's spangly "Ari"-- the final track in another functionally and technically sound set.
Like Touch, at times Speicher 2 suffers underneath the weight of Mayer's past achievements-- or maybe that's just microhouse beginning to show diminishing returns. But even if neither of these records ultimately match up to Kompakt's finest, they're still welcome outings, and proof that Mayer is the rare leader from whom "more of the same" is still a welcome proposition.
