Michael Mayer - Speicher 137 [Kompakt]

Format: 12" in label sleeve.
CAT: KompaktEx137

Michael Mayer returns to the Speicher series with his first release since last year's explosive The Floor Is Lava album. And yes, the floor is indeed lava when Mayer is in this sort of form — as he is here — with three tracks effortlessly swinging between the two poles of his music: the dance floor detonating and the heartstring-tuggingly beautiful.

To be fair, there’s more of the former here, though there's beauty in generous discipline too. The unrelenting Cry Me A Raver somehow manages to condense decades of Kompakt pleasure into six giddy minutes: disco-minded arpeggios, shimmering, hand-polished textures, abstruse patterns that drift in and out of time. Don’t Sync With My Tag progresses with destructive glee, the beat as undeniable as the shaker’s counter-rhythms are sensuously silky. There has always been something practical, functional, utilitarian about Speicher, but it doesn't get more everyday DJ life than this: Mayer tells us the title is “a super annoying message that pops up every time you open Rekordbox. Nobody knows what it means. It’s a DJ mystery.” But who needs answers?

By the time you start closing in on the enigma’s solution, Mayer has taken you from Cologne to Detroit with It Isn’t What It Isn’t, a little nod to Rhythim Is Rhythim. “You’re May, I’m Mayer; that’s what I used to tell him,” Michael quips. This track nearly made one of our cats jump right out of its skin, with its slinking cunning: amorphous, creeping electro noise; never-say-die percussions; all bathed in a nervous energy of fluorescent lights and silver machine gleam.

Speicher is Speicher doing what it does best, and this is a really good one. Make Mine Mayer!