Shinichi Atobe HHV Records 6 Items

2LP | 2024 | UK | Original (DDS)

Discipline

Release: 2024 / UK – Original

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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For years people were convinced that Atobe was a well known artist (probably German) working incognito. Thanks to a flowery twitter feed, plus some interviews, all that distraction has been finally laid to rest. Still offering little in the way of biographical factoids, though, Atobe lets the music do the talking in typically emotively nuanced and special style on his 7th album ‘Discipline’, offering further refinements of prevailing, salient ‘90s deep house, dub techno and ambient scenes cultivated and pruned to near perfection. Hailing a sensuality and feel for spaced movement that’s been lost to club music’s EQ arms race over the decades, he comes poised with a near ineffable lightness of being, flush with a newfound effervescence that’s come to define his work in recent years. There’s a real electro-acousmagique in-the-mix that conveys beautifully at low or high volume, elegantly guiding bodies in motion like little else. Atobe’s grasp of deferred gratification and tempered gravitas is really the key thing, carrying from the fluttering 8-bit melodies and purring techno bass of ‘SA DUB 1’ to tender beatdown and blushing FM chords, then into flirtations with hair-kissing trance like Convextion and Agcg gone Goa in ‘SA DUB 2’, thru brisk Red Planet techno and a sort of shoegazing, acidic panorama in ‘SA DUB 5’, defining Terrence Dixon-esque levels of Motor City mechanical nous on ‘SA DUB 6’, and into the subaquatic, pearlescent dub house promise of ‘SA DUB 7’.

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Butterfly Effect 2024 Repress

2LP | 2014 | UK | Reissue (DDS)

Release: 2014 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Up until the release of his debut album in 2014, Shinichi Atobe managed to stay off grid since his release on Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction imprint back in 2001. He delivered the second-to-last 12” on the label and then disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a solitary 12” and a trail of speculation that led some people to wonder whether the project was in fact the work of someone on the Basic Channel payroll.

That killer Chain Reaction 12” was also a long time favourite of Demdike Stare, who had been trying to follow the trail and make contact with Atobe for many years before a lead from the Basic Channel office turned up an address in japan and - unbelievably - an album full of archival and new material. That material was compiled and released back in 2014 as Butterfly Effect.

And what a weird and brilliant album it is - deployed with a slow-churn opener that sounds like a syruppy Actress track, before working through a brilliantly sharp and tactile 9 minute Piano House roller that sounds like DJ Sprinkles at his most bittersweet, before diving headlong into a heady, Vainqueur inspired droneworld. It’s full of odd little signatures that gives the whole thing a timeless feel - like a sound bubble from another era.

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2LP | 2018 | UK | Reissue (DDS)

Heat 2024 Repress

Release: 2018 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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An hour of deeply inspirational House music for the ages that could have been produced 20 years ago, or earlier this year - we’ll probably never know.

Heat is a new double album from Shinichi Atobe for DDS. It follows on from last year’s “From The Heart, It’s A Start, A Work Of Art” set and continues a run of highly enigmatic, acclaimed and completely unparalleled productions that follow their own timeless logic. There’s no sonic fiction involved - this material really does just turn up on a CD sent by air mail from Japan to Manchester, sparse info, no messing, pure gold.

What’s that cover art about? prob something to do with the balmy material within. So Good, So Right, the 10 minute opener, will force you to forget about all the shite around you for a while. There are also several tracks called Heat; they’re all killer.

This music takes you elsewhere almost immediately; that fan on your desk is basically a summer breeze. In fact, this whole album is absurd; completely effortless; a classic.

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From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art 2024 Repress

2LP | 2017 | UK | Reissue (DDS)

Release: 2017 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Shinichi Atobe exists out of time, producing material that’s both inimitable and genuine. "From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art” was released back in 2017 and is perhaps the most unique and enduring of all of his output over the years. Curiously, it has origins going all the way back to early 2000, when three of the tracks here were originally produced and cut to acetate at D&M in Berlin (in an edition of 5!), presumably lined up as a follow-up of sorts to Atobe’s legendary "Ship Scope" 12” for Chain reaction from the same era. Alas, it wasn’t to be, and almost two decades later these tracks, re-mastered from that original acetate, make up the centrepiece of this amazing record alongside mesmerising newer productions.

The tracks here are effectively some of the Japanese producer’s earliest work, showcasing the sort of tender, feminine pressure that would bubble up on the Ship-Scope EP and later be revealed in his new productions, Butterfly Effect and World yet, for many reasons, would lay sunk in his archive for the next 17 years.

The tracks taken from that acetate are labelled First Plate 1-3 and are quite remarkable, having taken on so much added weight over the years that the incidental crackle of surface noise imbues proceedings with an added dimension that’s hard to fathom. it basically sounds like a lost transmission making its way from Paul-Lincke-Ufer at the turn of the millennium to a new, completely changed world all these years later.

The patina of crackle lends a mist-on-bare skin feeling akin to summer garden parties at Berghain in the stepping First Plate 1, and gives a foggier sort of depth perception to the hydraulic, Maurizian heft of First Plate 2, but it’s the submerged euphoria of First Plate 3 that hits the hardest; a heady, bittersweet reminder of days gone by.

The other four tracks are crisply transferred from master tapes, relinquishing a sublime, impossible to categorise House variant that recalls everything from DJ Sprinkles to Ron Trent, yet with that weird, timeless production style that by now has become something of a signature for this most distinctive and hard to categorise producer. For our money, it ranks among the finest and most distinctive in the Chain Reaction / Shinichi canon.

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2LP | 2020 | UK | Reissue (DDS)

Yes 2024 Repress

Release: 2020 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Electronic & Dance

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Black 2LP re-press, edition of 300 copies. Mastered by Rashad Becker, includes a download of the album dropped to your account.

Shinichi Atobe’s fifth album for DDS, his first in two years. Deep and sublime, the classic Chain Reaction < > Chicago House vibe, but this time with a swarming Drexciyan undercurrent, somewhere between DJ Sprinkles, Dopplereffekt and The Other People Place, and yet still 100% Shinichi.

It’s odd working with an artist without ongoing dialogue; no context or an exchange of ideas. It’s all conjecture. Here's another CD of material in the post from Shinichi, two years more or less since the last one. No words except for the track titles. Oh, a photo this time.

‘Yes’, positivity, hope. But the album starts with a dystopian vision; something like Dopplereffekt’s sound-chemistry experiments, a tense builder. Big optimistic chasms open up, the Piano House euphoria of the title track, beautiful sunset closer 'Ocean 1’. But there’s a noticeable change too. 'Lake 2’ is more fraught sci-fi, 'Lake 3’ a sort of percussive Chain Reaction monster, 'Loop 1’, on a Drexciyan tip.

It’s all coated in that weird - some people say infuriating - toppy production, witnessed this time in a more tempered and different formation courtesy of an amazing Rashad Becker master, all precise but loosely swung arrangements. Everything slow to unfurl but, also, everything in exactly the right place.

<3

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2LP | 2022 | UK | Original (DDS)

Love Of Plastic

£ 33.10*