No Hesitation, No Obligation: Michael Mayer on 20 years of Kompakt

In the trend-determined world of dance and electronic music, imagine running a record label for 20 years. Michael Mayer, one of a community of musical devotees behind Cologne’s seminal imprint Kompakt, has managed just that. Always distinctive and yet wildly multi-faceted, Kompakt has, throughout its continuing evolution, represented mind blowing big room techno, leftfield pop experimentation and chin-stroking shoegaze. It has at once been accused of being too serious and too silly, too samey and too weird, but through artists as diverse as The Field, Matias Aguayo, WhoMadeWho and DJ Koze, Kompakt has left few alternative record collections untouched. With Mayer having recently stated that “the best is yet to come,” one wonders about his secret formula to keeping life in the Kompakt community so consistent and exciting.

“Every Monday morning there's a roll call under the Kompakt banner, where the Pet Shop Boys' Being Boring is played”, he says with typical humour, returning from Barcelona where the label has just hosted its annual beach party at the close of the city’s Sónar festival.

The history of Kompakt extends back to 1988, when Mayer visited a new branch of underground record store Delirium in Cologne on its first day. Despite the pedigree of the store in Frankfurt, Mayer was openly dismayed by the lack of selection and quickly drew up a list of what to order. Six months and some part-time shifts later, and he was a partner alongside Wolfgang Voigt and Jürgen Paape. Nowadays, the original team, plus many more, run a communal headquarters that incorporates basement studios, a distribution warehouse and living space for staff.

Kompakt’s most recent dispatch, a four-track remix package of Mayer’s 2012 LP Mantasy, marks its 272nd release. That’s not counting the various sub-labels and imprints also threaded through the whole two-decade operation, which, taken together, push the 500 mark. For this year’s well-earned victory lap compilations, Kollektion 1 + 2, Mayer has had a lot of music to revisit.

“I wanted the collection to be more than a best of. I was aiming for a nice blend of stone cold classics and personal favourites,” he explains. Featuring a time-honoured span of releases, both packages aim for the dancefloor as well as home listening. Any pleasant surprises? “Listening to Dettinger's Totentanz from 1999 made me laugh. It’s the first dubstep track ever made. Sorry UK, we did it first... Seriously, there are many very early Kompakt releases that still sound surprisingly current.”

While we're sure there would be a few figures keen to contest Mayer’s presumably tongue-in-cheek claim that Kompakt invented dubstep, the label has never been afraid to push things forward into new territory. Perhaps the label’s biggest success story is not only the fact it eventually became synonymous with minimal house in the 00s, but also that it has been able to reinvent itself almost completely since.

Despite his reputation as a thoroughly positive character (he has recently returned from a seven-date tour of the US, where he argues the scene is “very healthy away from the glowstick madness”), Mayer isn't immune to being wound up by a few aspects of the modern dancefloor. Last year’s long awaited sophomore LP, the aforementioned Mantasy, contained a direct command for fans to put their camera phones away, disguised as a wistful slice of dance pop in the form of lead single Good Times. Has his stealthy awareness campaign worked?

“I've actually had ‘No Smartphones’ stickers made,” he reveals. “Flashing them never fails to impress... I've just had one of the best reactions to them ever, at a Brooklyn rooftop party. The poor guy was high like a kite, he stood right before me, filming this most interesting scene: a DJ at work. You should have seen his face when I held the sticker in front of his lens. It took him a good hour to get his shit together again. Now he’s cured from smartphonitis.”

Mayer is set to continue this unique brand of community work and continue to tour throughout the summer, including a stop at Croatia’s beloved Electric Elephant festival, which, he concurs, is fortunately the sort of event where punters are unlikely to be waving their devices about. “Last year, there was a guy faking phone calls for an hour or so with a macaw parrot clung to his ear,” he recalls fondly. “Why not?”

On his return from Croatia, Mayer will be headlining Little Sister’s Kompakt party at Liverpool’s Kazimer on 13 July (which follows fellow Merseyside promoters Freeze's daytime performance from Kompakt labelmate Gui Boratto at St Luke's 'Bombed Out' church). It’s his second visit to the city this year, following an all-nighter back in March. With 25 years of records behind him, Mayer says that, these days "my heart belongs to the idea of hosting a whole night from A-Z. Anything less than three hours leaves me rather unsatisfied, " he concludes. 

One of Mayer's most admirable aspects, as reflected in Kompakt, is his ability to – if we can quote drum'n'bass doc Source Delight – ‘just like, do his own thing, and all that sort of thing’. While many producers and DJs end up locked in what can appear to be in a dull and creatively prohibitive cycle of production, promotion, rinse and repeat, Mayer instead presents a more free-spirited personal aesthetic; production work and remixes seem to occur in flurries, and while he’s almost always DJing, fans – who only seemed to increase in number during the period – spent the best part of a decade between 2004’s Touch waiting for his most recent full-length. Mayer agrees with this assessment of his methodology, while adding a brief proviso: "That is true," he says, but "sometimes, I suffer from not having enough time to spend in the studio.

“But between travelling, running the company and my little family, there’s not much time left for production. It’s a fact I got used to it, and I don’t regret having chosen this road. It’s still better than hiring ghost producers like so many others do. I’m taking a certain pride in my authenticity. I never thought I would say this... But in that sense my music is like German beer. Don’t you use that as a headline!”