Audiopile Review: No one causes quite a stir around the shop quite like Shinichi Atobe when a new release is announced. And we’re blessed with two of them this week! Thought we were gonna get blanked on the Ongaku 1 EP that dropped in the first half of 2024, disappearing basically overnight, but thankfully the opening salvo for DDS’ new series of 12”s has been granted a necessary repress. Returning to the 12” format for only the second time since his initial appearance, the two tracker showcases Atobe in top form—from the expertly sequenced Detroit techno-via-Japanese-deep-house of the title track and over to the starry richness of “Dub 6(six)”, Onagku 1 is essential Atobe. By the end of last year, Ongaku 1 was followed by the surprise announcement of his 7th full length, the razor sharp Discipline, which further refines his threading of lush ‘90s house with the grey-scale textures of dub techno minimalism. The now instantly recognizable “Atobe Sound” can be heard across contemporary techno and house, but his ability to push diamond-edged techno through a velvet-y bottom end is like no other. Discipline is certainly an album worth diving into piece by piece, each track a standout worth a deep dive, but to be honest, we only have a handful of these to go around and most Atobe fanatics won’t need the sales pitch.

“International man of dub techno mystery, Shinichi Atobe returns to DDS with a new double album of pensile steppers and lip-smacking, feathered swang, a good 10 years since first crossing paths with Demdike Stare’s label – a massive RIYL for any heads into DJ Sprinkles, Red Planet, Mike Huckaby, Sususmu Yokota, Convextion, NWAQ.

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’.

Chef’s kisses, all the way.” – Boomkat