‘You definitely have to be looking forward if you’re going to be doing music like this.”

At 30 years old, techno producer Mike Shannon is justified in making such proclamations. The Kitchener-Waterloo native has, after all, been immersed in the music for more than half of his life, having started DJing at the age of 13 and creating original sounds soon after.

Heavily influenced by many of Detroit’s god-fathers of techno as well as by his “family of Canadian friends” that includes Scott Monteith a.k.a. Deadbeat, Jeff Milligan a.k.a. Algorithm, Marc Leclair a.k.a. Akufen and Adam Marshall, Shannon has spent much of his production career “blurring the lines between what gets defined as a clear-cut dancefloor thing and something a little more left-field or artistic.”

 “There are so many different ways you can explore the genre,” says Shannon, “but a lot of people seem to stick really close to rigid formulas and do what they’ve heard before or do what they know to work. There aren’t all that many people who really play or cross those lines and still manage to make a dancefloor really work.”

To that end, the last five years have been particularly fruitful for Shannon. In 2003, he moved from Toronto to Montreal to be closer to the artists he was releasing on his Cynosure label. He also released his debut album, Slight of Hand, on Germany’s Force Inc. He’s taken risks both personally and professionally, releasing the more experimental album Possible Conclusions To Stories That Never End on ~scape in 2006, and moving with his long-time girlfriend to Santiago, Chile — where they were both involved in the Montreal-based Mutek festival’s South American activities — and then to Valencia, Spain.

Like many Canadian artists looking to be “closer to the action” in terms of bookings, Shannon eventually made the move to Berlin. He’s called it home for the past year and a half, with his family — Shannon and his partner now have a four-month-old daughter — living very close to the studio he shares with Monteith.

It is here that Shannon has crafted the most consistent and confident album of his career. Due out on September 8, Memory Tree also fulfills Shannon’s lifelong ambition of having a release on Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 Records.

 “I’ve been sending him demos since I started and nothing quite worked out,” laughs the producer. “I hadn’t sent him anything in years and Rich actually got in touch and asked if I’d like to do an EP. I said ‘Okay, I’d love to, but what about going one step further with the whole thing? I’ve got an album ready.’

 “I gave him the album and by the next week, we were figuring everything out. With the exception of some mixing, the album is pretty much the way it was when I gave it to him.”
Which is to say, the album is pure quality. Each of the nine pieces is varied in sound and tempo. They tell complete stories, with a beginning, an arc and a conclusion. Most of all, they’re heavily textured and engaging, all within a genre where minimalism has long been the aim of the game.

 “To me, there’s something that resonates throughout the whole record — this techno soul, techno jazz thing,” allows Shannon. “I really wanted to give that a good push to show people ‘this is also possible and also really works.’ When you’re living in this town, you hear so many things that really are so funkless in so many ways.”

Much of Memory Tree is rooted in Shannon’s efforts to put funk at the forefront of his techno. “Enero” is an obvious dancefloor burner, merging techno’s past, present and future into one irresistible whole.

 “That was really an homage to Mike Banks’ Galaxy 2 Galaxy thing and also to Juan Atkins, who were my major influences when I started doing techno,” shares Shannon. “I really was getting back into that sound again as opposed to the more stripped down, sparse stuff. ‘Enero’ really has a full palette; there are close to 30 tracks of things happening in there so it’s really the opposite of what minimal techno is.”

Expect to hear this approach reflected in Shannon’s three homecoming gigs — in Waterloo, Toronto and Montreal respectively.

 “More and more, I’m playing stuff that’s a bit more positive and uplifting,” he says, with a chuckle. “I hate to say those things because it sounds so cliché — like a happy-go-lucky trance DJ — but at the same time, a lot of the records that I’m playing have more of an up, party kind of feeling to them.”