by RAF KATIGBAK

It was the mid-’90s and dance music was in trouble. The soulful techno sound that Detroit pioneers had fought so hard to bring to an international audience was being taken over by sugar-glazed one hit wonders and novelty acts like Scatman and Rednex. Things looked, in a word, bleak. But out of the din of “skeebeedeebies” and banjo riffs, one city laid siege to the bastion of cheesy over-the-top techno spiralling out of control in the European dance charts. That city was Cologne, and the sound was minimalism. Spearheading the movement was Kompakt, the label that has become synonymous with Cologne. With a desire to boil dance music down to its bare essentials, Kompakt was born out of founder Wolfgang Voigt’s “cubistic-Dadaistic” take on acid house and DJ/producer Michael Mayer’s penchant for deep and abstract techno. Now, what started as an experiment in reduction has grown into a techno empire with several successful sub-labels, a legendary DJ shop and a distribution company handling over 60 labels from around the world (including Montreal’s Musique Risquée). Always a step ahead of the rest, Kompakt is an institution. Mayer’s infamous “sexy and dangerous” DJ sets have taken him all over the world and will see him appear in North America for the first time here in Montreal. The Mirror recently caught up with him for the chance to talk neo-trance and the Neptunes.

Mirror: You guys have moved away from the extreme minimal sound and are constantly switching it up—what’s up with that?

Michael Mayer: Too much repetition leads to stagnation. Our slogan is “never being boring,” so we always try to be one step ahead, to allow influences that might seem absurd at the first sight.

M: Like that neo-trance thing you guys started. Pretty bold move to dive into a genre that most minimal producers snicker at.

MM: It’s so important to keep this playful approach to what we’re doing, it brings back the joy and helps initiate innovation. We’ve seen how acid disappeared and came back every few years, we saw vocals being banned out of the techno context and they came back, now the dub element is totally out of fashion and so on. Sometimes stylistic elements have to be absent for a time until they make sense again. This so-called “terrible electroclash” period brought back hooks and melodies, now that the hype is dead there’s space for inspired music. I think techno has never been this free and versatile.

M: Kompakt has always been influenced by pop music. Are you feeling the Neptunes’ latest?

MM: I absolutely love those guys. Them, Timbaland and Dr. Dre did some of the most stunning minimal tracks recently. Dre’s Chronic 2001 album is a milestone in minimal production to me. These guys are just unbeatable at this point.

M: Finally, mega-clubs are dying and record labels are suing teenagers for downloading albums—what’s the future of the techno?

MM: Vinyl will survive. It saw the CD coming, and dying right now, and all the other digital options are just not sexy enough. I think the techno scene will keep on declining but on the other hand we’ll see a renaissance of inspired clubs that are less dogmatic, and more enthusiastic about the essential things in nightlife—dancing, sweating, flirting. The whole social-sexual dimension of clubbing, this will never die.

With Reinhard Voigt at SAT on Friday, Sept. 26, 9pm, $15/$20

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