It might not feel like it now, at a time when the internet has rendered so many mysteries of the era moot, but from the mid 1990s until not long after the turn of the millennium, Berlin’s Chain Reaction label was among the most cryptic operations in electronic music. Label heads Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, better known as Basic Channel, kept a defiantly low profile, and the label’s artists trafficked in a dizzying array of aliases; some, like the solo project known simply as Various Artists (Torsten Pröfrock, aka T++, Erosion, et al), continue to flummox databases decades later. The label’s sound didn’t exactly lend itself to transparency, either: grainy dub techno emphasizing collective ethos over individual ego, in which shadows and murk threatened to drown out techno’s steady footfall.
Chain Reaction’s most enduring mystery came with its penultimate release, in 2001: Ship-Scope, a near-perfect EP of shimmering ambient techno credited to one Shinichi Atobe, a total unknown. Unknown he remained: Chain Reaction gave up the ghost two years later, and Atobe dropped out of sight, seemingly for good. Many listeners assumed that he was really another Chain Reaction artist in disguise. Then, in 2014, Demdike Stare’s Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, allegedly following a tip from the Basic Channel office, claimed to have tracked down the artist at home in Saitama, Japan; they came away with an album’s worth of unreleased material, some new and some archival. The result, Butterfly Effect, built upon Ship-Scope’s dream-world architecture with a tantalizing assortment of styles, from glistening, minimalist house to dissonant musique concrete to lumpy rhythm studies poised somewhere between Dettinger and Burial.
Whoever Atobe may be—and the promise of an upcoming live debut in Japan suggests that maybe he really is just a reclusive dude—the past few years have found the project definitively revitalized. Since Butterfly Effect, he has released a Ship-Scope reissue, the mini-album World, and the short Rebuild Mix 1.2.3 EP, a remix project in which Atobe’s hand obliterated all traces of the original. From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art fleshes out his catalog with 40 more minutes of music, and it is uniformly striking stuff. While not as wide-ranging as Butterfly Effect, it is richer and fuller than World, and though it retains ambient music’s atmospheres, it focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotional content.
That’s particularly true of its two most substantial cuts. In “Regret,” bright chords reminiscent of DJ Sprinkles flare over a bare-bones boom-tick rhythm, with hi-hats chirping like crickets. In “Republic,” a flayed open hi-hat suggests peak-time techno at its most severe, yet watery synths and midsection-caressing sub-bass suggest almost shoegaze-like vibes. Both tracks are little more than static loops, all but unchanging over the course of their nearly 10-minute run, yet their hypnotic repetitions and naïve melodies wrap you up in a kind of cocoon.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that’s so enveloping, and so moving, about Atobe’s work. Some of it comes down to his tonal sensibility. Like “Rainstick” and “The Red Line,” from his debut EP, his best tracks here seem to emanate a rosy glow, and his chord progressions, simple as they are, are masterful exercises in tension and release. Not everything is such a wistful reverie, though. “The Test of Machine 2” sounds like an etude for melting wind chimes, while “The Test of Machine 1” hammers uneven kick drums over a backdrop of bell tones and mechanical clatter, like a fax machine eating an old Jeff Mills cassette.
For many, the most fascinating material here will be a trio of songs that builds upon the Shinichi Atobe mystery. Before Chain Reaction ever released Ship-Scope, claim Canty and Whittaker, Atobe recorded a three-track EP that was cut to acetate—a vinyl-like material, often used for dubplates, more susceptible to wear and tear than the wax used in commercially released records—in an edition of five. The original EP was never released, but three tracks on the new album have allegedly been remastered directly from those crumbling acetates. “First Plate 1” is a luminous dub techno sketch that certainly sounds like it could have been recorded in 2000, with a muted, compressed quality reminiscent of a seventh-generation cassette dub. The vinyl crackle is even thicker and creamier on “First Plate 2,” a deliciously dubby stepper that suggests a more narcotic take on Basic Channel’s Maurizio project. And on “First Plate 3,” surface noise settles over a resonant dub-techno roller like a low mist hugging the countryside.
The story raises more questions than it does answers: Why were only five acetates made, and then no records pressed? Why didn’t they utilize the original master disk for the reissue, or, better, the original DAT or digital file? And why, if they really did work off of such a damaged acetate, did they choose to emphasize all that surface noise, rather than minimizing it? It’s impossible to tell how much of the sound design is intentional, and how much is a result of the alleged remastering process. But as with William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops or Burial’s “Distant Lights,” the degraded sound quality becomes an integral part of the music’s emotional experience. Wherever and whenever the music has come to us from, it wears all the signs of a great journey. And as with bards of yore, it’s the storytelling, not the veracity of the tale, that keeps us rapt.
