On the 20th of August 1519, the great Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in search of a westward route to the fabled Spice Islands. A generation younger than Columbus, Magellan’s was an age of exploration, of voyages of discovery, whose wondrous tales would soon feed into a dawning proto-science fiction of trips to the moon and far flung utopias. Magellan’s journey would make him the first to cross the Pacific, and ultimately became the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe (though Magellan himself would be dead before his fleet returned to Spain). This year, just a little short of half a millennium later, producer, label boss and superstar DJ, Michael Mayer sets sail upon waves of sound for his own far-flung desert shore, an island he has named ‘Mantasy’.

Google the word and you will find references to an old Stephen Colbert routine about mundane male fantasies. Mayer has other things in mind. “I didn’t choose the word,” he insists. “It chose me. It was suddenly on my tongue. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t know what it means. And I still don’t exactly know what it means. But, while working on the album, Mantasy became this point of escape for me.” And what an escape. From the rich, wave-like swells of album opener ‘Sully’, to the hedonistic, neon cityscape of closer ‘Good Times’ via ‘Baumhaus’’s filtered birdsong and the oriental-sounding sample which kicks off ‘Roses’, Mantasy is a journey of a record, a veritable voyage of discovery in sound.

Mantasy stands for an island or a continent that has been undiscovered so far which I would discover doing my work on the album,” claims Mayer. “The making of the album was a journey to that.” So it may come as less of a surprise than it might have done that Mayer claims the two main influences behind the album were not classic tracks from Detroit or recent club smashes fresh out of Ibiza; not musical at all in fact, but literary. “Two books definitely had a big impact on the album,” he admits. One was David Toop’s ambient odyssey, Ocean of Sound, and the other was Stefan Zweig’s Conqueror of the Seas, a biography of Ferdinand Magellan.

[read the full interview at The Line of Best Fit]

11/04/12 at 1:47pm