Mantasy (LP + Cd)

(en) It's been eight years since MICHAEL MAYER released his debut album "Touch", but one certainly couldn't consider him lazy, what with a tightly packed schedule of DJ gigs and umpteen remixes. All the more reason that Kompakt is pleased to announce the sophomore album MANTASY, a long-awaited, indispensable update of Michael Mayer's production sound and an essential release for the label in 2012. One tends to think that it's relatively easy: you make some sounds, you launch a label, you release some records… ultimately, electronic music is known for its short chain of command. Accordingly, "Touch" was created in just a few weeks, "and frankly, you can hear that", says Michael Mayer: "MANTASY is my second solo album, but for me it's really the first one". Indeed, the masterful sequencing and high production value bear witness to an artist in full control of his medium. You may think of the release as a "DJ album", not so much describing an album for DJs, but rather one from a DJ: "I really can't hide that", explains the musician, "MANTASY clearly reflects the gazillions of sounds I'm listening to in private, especially my love for soundtracks or soundtrack-like music." The album's title refers to the escapist momentum of a cinematic journey into the unknown, a tribute to history's great explorers, "to characters obsessed with an idea, to totally wrong conceptions of the world and faulty sea charts, to inconceivable exertions, all that lunacy", but also an intimate trip to the core of the Kompakt sound itself, whose main ambassador has always been Michael Mayer. Fittingly, the voyage starts with the panoramic "Sully", a flawless ambient study that opens the gateway to the world of MANTASY, which – hardly definable, but always palpable – relates to a romantic spirit of adventure, curiosity and nostalgia, yet far less concerned with the past than with the future. A case in point is "Lamusetwa", a track where memories and dreams collide in a most satisfying manner: "Th