Michael Mayer

Cofounder of Cologne’s iconic Kompakt label, Michael Mayer has been a ringleader of German house and techno since the mid-’90s. Born in Black Forest in 1971, Mayer got his first taste of dance music as a young teen, when a DJ from his neighborhood snuck him into the booth. He bought his first turntables with his paper-route money, and by his early twenties, he’d moved to Cologne, gotten a record-store job, and fallen in with the crew with which he would go on to cofound Kompakt in 1998. Mayer released his breakthrough album, Touch, in 2004, though many of his most classic anthems appear on singles and EPs, particularly those in Kompakt’s long-running Speicher series. As a producer and DJ alike, Mayer’s music mixes lean, muscular techno with a more buoyant, melodic sensibility inherited from disco and synth-pop—it’s not surprising, then, that he has remixed artists such as Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode, or that his DJ mixes, such as 2017’s DJ-Kicks, feature artists like Peter Zummo and Marc Almond alongside friends and peers from Kompakt’s extended family.