I used to be really into minimal electronic music. When the mood strikes, I still am, but I’ve been on sabbatical by and large. Through it all, some of my favorite electronic music happens to have been characterized by mystery, either in terms of its creator or its circumstances of release (take Galcher Lustwerk’s many aliases, for example, or maybe Burial).
Anyway, lately I’ve been getting into some really excellent cuts from Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe, whose own catalog—while pretty prolific—is admittedly hard to trace. In discussing Atobe’s July release, Yes, Ray Philp mused,
“Reasonably secure in the knowledge that he isn’t the figment of a German man’s imagination, we can probably abide the not-knowing of his life story. But there are still so many questions, the most immediate of which might be this: After all those years of inactivity, how is it that Atobe came to be this reliable, this prolific, or this good?”
Getting more into his work I was also struck by this remarkable consistency, and the perfect mix of patience and playfulness at hand in these tracks. Superb such as to refresh my ears, anyhow.