The wabi-sabi school of thought is one of Japan’s most influential aesthetic philosophies, informing many aspects of Japanese culture and artmaking. Finding beauty in the imperfect, the everyday, and otherwise mundane, wabi-sabi proposes an alternate perspective on the world around us. Shinichi Atobe’s music has never strived for outward perfection. It’s been strange, amorphous, dare we say awkward? He’s part of that ilk of producers who can’t help but create left-field dance music, even if they’re aiming for the opposite. From the dubby techno of 2001’s Ship-Scope to the deep house of last year’s Yes, Atobe’s music has always distilled its genre signifiers by way of its creator’s specific point of view. The notion of wabi-sabi has never felt more present in Japan’s dance music than it is with Atobe. And while his peers like Foodman have exercised the notion to some extent by finding inspiration in the mundane, Atobe is singular in his application of this philosophy to the music itself. The tilted quality of what he creates is echoed in his strange sequencing of tracks across his albums. Titled in numerical order, these are scattered across different bodies of work. Loop 1 from Yes for instance, is given a companion in Loop 6 on his new album Love Of Plastic.
Atobe himself is as fascinating as his work. After Ship-Scope landed in 2001, he basically went AWOL. It was only fourteen years later, after being headhunted by Demdike Stare, that he returned to releasing music in a traditional capacity. Apparently, he has catalogues of stuff that remain unreleased, at least in the scope of a traditional record cycle. Atobe’s auteur-like approach to how he crafts his music has made him all the more elusive and beguiling. What you’ll soon realise after spending time with an album like 2014’s Butterfly Effect or Yes, is that while the style of his music is immediately familiar, the approach is quite unlike anything or anyone else. On Love Of Plastic, Atobe shows no signs of lifting the veil. Instead, he plunges further into his mode of thought to deliver some of his slickest work to date.
Love Of Plastic explores the qualities of its namesake through a collection of undulating, lubricious deep-house tracks. He begins in liquid form on Intro, a bubbling pot of something viscous that boils into a steady thud. On Love of Plastic 1, the molten tonality continues, buth here it sloshes against the sharp hi-hats of 90’s tinged house. Beyond the pale pops like bubble wrap, with rolling drum fills and a steady bass kick, while serpentine and metallic techno synths writhe and twist in the distance. For Atobe, plastic is a means toward exploring the ephemeral. It’s the possibility of shaping, re-shaping and being ductile, much like himself. The music on Love Of Plastic feels pliant in all the ways that plastic might be; from the rough, jagged crinkle of cellophane on the acidic Love of plastic 8 to the liquid latex fluidity of tracks like Love of Plastic 1 and Love of Plastic 5. The bounce of rubber can be felt all over the excellent Beyond the pale, with its ricocheting and protuberant bass. On album closer Severina, mercurial machine sounds are pulled and contorted beneath a techno pulse and three-chord synth riff, recalling the metallic plasticity of SOPHIE.
House music can be difficult to make distinct, in the sense that it relies on constant time and loops of a four-on-the-floor that’s impossible (and unnecessary) to try to reinvent. What distinguishes pieces of house from (or likens them to) each other depends on the perspective of its maker, and how that perspective is translated into the sounds that are mixed into the pulse. Atobe understands the physics of dance music, which gives him the freedom to bend the atoms of house and techno to his will. His bass kicks and his beats throb, but there’s a slipperiness to what he creates that makes for his distinguishing factor. His music is as distinct as it is familiar, using the codes of house music but not quite adhering to a tee. On Love of Plastic, he’s embraced his instinctual slipperiness more ardently than before to deliver a slickly lacquered body of work that oozes as much as it slaps.
Listen to Beyond the pale from Love Of Plastic below.
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