Shinichi Atobe’s arresting house and techno beams with inimitable candor, built from bright, phlegmatic loops that run on an eccentric internal logic. Now a quarter century into a career largely characterized by mystique and a seeming avoidance of the public eye, Atobe has spent the better part of the 2020s slowly opening up, with some bemusement. His laconic interview with Tone Glow in 2024—most noteworthy for being the first time anyone had asked the alleged recluse to go on the record—revealed an artist with little interest in extended introspection or narrativization beyond a few quaint details. (His favorite hobby? “Sleeping.”) Accordingly, Atobe’s sound has evolved laterally over the course of the decade, reupholstering the artist’s quirks into a series of mutually reminiscent albums that stand apart from one another as much for their placid, eerie cover photos as they do for their content. Silent Way, Atobe’s newest album, finds him at perhaps his most confident, but also his least digestible.
Silent Way commemorates a seamless yet noteworthy change in Atobe’s career. It’s his first full-length to be released on his own label, Plastic & Sounds, rather than on Demdike Stare’s DDS, whose long-running partnership with Atobe—maintained through airmailed CDs—played an integral part in publicizing both his unique sound and his taciturn character. Plastic & Sounds launched with a flurry of 12" singles through the back end of 2025, tracks that follow closely in the wake of 2024’s Discipline: dubby, uptempo odysseys in a constant state of flux, delays and metered oscillations teasing bubbly synth leads in and out of twilight. Silent Way continues in this tack while finding room for more reflective work to pad between the highs. Lead single “Rain 1” is a break-driven beat dotted with crystalline chimes, occasionally giving way to brusque melodies that peter out as though half-remembered. In its length and relative stasis, the piece takes on a neurotic, obsessive quality; like a ghost, it retraces its routine endlessly, as if clinging on to something that might slip away.
The album’s more frenetic tracks lean further toward the uncanny, developing chimeric grooves that brim with unresolved tension. “TRNS” stitches dissonant semitones into an insistent, threatening pulse that feels like an anxiety attack in slow motion. The slyly addictive “Blurred” submerges its jaunty bass-driven loop in an algorithmic haze of stuttering vocal grains and bleating sine waves. Played in full, Silent Way induces a pervasive nausea, reveling in gawky soundscapes that seem barely able to contain their outsized, clashing ideas. “Syndrome” whirls together oil and water, pitting spindly metallic percussion against dispassionate strings and a clipped, androgynous vocal to create a distinctly heterogeneous mixture. No Atobe album before has worked quite so hard to be difficult.
This sense of difficulty tends to prevent Silent Way from reaching the ascendant highs of Atobe’s best material. In its back-to-back knottiness, the album takes on an ungainly quality that, deliberate or not, sets up roadblocks to prolonged enjoyment. This isn’t to say that the album doesn’t offer its share of uncomplicated pleasures: “Phase 2,” a peppy lightshow of cascading, aqueous delays underscored with the warm chatter of a sound like shuffling playing cards, is among the most joyous tracks Atobe has ever produced. The stellar closer “Defect” draws deft microtonal contrast between its competing elements, crafting a dense, smoky panorama that lingers beautifully at the boundary of dusk. These tracks achieve harmoniousness because of Atobe’s quirkier, harsher instincts, not in spite of them; while he doesn’t always nail the balance on Silent Way, it’s heartening that he’s still willing to explore the boundaries of legibility. What lingers is a firm testament to Atobe’s capability to surprise within his modest range. Twenty-five years on, it’s one of the most valuable qualities he offers.
