Michael Mayer: Immer

When it manages to break from caricature, minimal German techno takes a reductive approach to soul by squeezing the flailing limbs of funk into a straitjacket. Under his Soul Center alias, Thomas Brinkmann goes out of his way to avoid anything so abstract. One of the most severe minimalists from Cologne, Brinkmann typically busies himself with musical schematics, ranging from micromanaged dance tracks to Klick, an album constructed from studiously carved vinyl etchings. On Soul Center's third eponymous album (distinguishable from two past volumes by a mechanical dog on the cover), Brinkmann takes a more human approach to his beloved soul music from the '60s and '70s. Still hyper-stylized and high-wire taut, the album bumps and grinds against soul signifiers like clipped guitars, barrelhouse pianos, and earthy vocal samples that ooze Stax-era cool. More refined than its somewhat ham-fisted predecessors, Soul Center heaves energy on "Funky Sterling," a cackling banger formed around a funky keyboard riff and a looped piano chord that sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis stuck in locked-groove perpetuity. The album lags through a few middling dubscapes, but the runoff from tracks like "26 Chicky Boom" and the fiery, sermon-sampling "How Far Do You Wanna Go" could teach Moby a thing or two about meeting soul music halfway. The mostly German artists on Michael Mayer's mix-disc Immer cook up just as much soul, but their deal with the devil is negotiated strictly on techno's terms. Immer slithers between the kind of glazed-over dub valleys and evocative trance-y peaks that have made Kompakt a drool-inducing label for techno aesthetes. Starting with a patch of squirming mid-tempo restlessness, Mayer charts an impeccably sequenced journey through techno's most brooding reaches. Carsten Jost's "You Don't Need A Weatherman" runs a menacing undercurrent beneath chirping birds and crackling leaves courtesy of remixer Superpitcher, who helped pioneer the glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare of Kompakt's "heroin house" sound. Elsewhere, tracks by Stargazer, Akufen, and Phantom/Ghost walk a fine line between agitation and tranquility, tickling frayed nerve endings with chilling effectiveness. Mayer proves himself a worthy DJ storyteller by juggling tension and release, but more than anything, he smashes the myth of soulless techno with tracks that pack telling tales in the margins of texture and sheen.