Even from an initial scan of the tracklist, it’s clear that Discipline is a different kind of Shinichi Atobe album. The Japanese producer usually scatters numbered sequences of tracks out of order across his records, suggesting a small selection from a vast Aphexian archive whose scale we can only guess at. “Ocean 1” and “Ocean 7” turned up on 2020’s Yes, for instance, but “Ocean 2” didn’t appear until 2022’s Love of Plastic, and if there are more in the series, we’ll have to wait to hear them. Discipline, meanwhile, is a finite sequence: “SA DUB 1” through “SA DUB 8,” each track in the right order, each bearing the weight of the 46-minute album roughly equally. No cryptic interludes, no dead ends, nothing remotely as strange as “Rain 6,” from his Peace of Mind EP just three months ago: just eight rock-solid variations on a theme that add up to something more like Donato Dozzy’s austere genre exercises than Atobe’s usual rabbit holes.
Discipline homes in on a specific sound, debuted earlier this year on “Dub 6(six),” the B-side of a limited-edition single for DDS: a midpoint between the dub techno of Atobe’s earlier releases and the sunnier house sound he’s been moving towards since 2018’s Heat. The term “dub techno” typically implies a rainy, vaporous strain of music that often drifts into pure ambient abstraction; Atobe’s worked in this mode before, most notably on his canonical Ship-Scope EP from 2001, but this is a different interpretation of what those two words can mean in tandem. Discipline is less interested in creating a sense of space, which is usually the starting point for techno producers appropriating techniques from Jamaican dub, than in using delay to create rhythmic interest. It’s more BCD-2 than BCD: Atobe threads spiderwebs of echo between his pistoning house chords as robust drum patterns pump away, and the only “ambient” track, “SA DUB 5,” just sounds like an acid house track with the drums snipped out.
Atobe’s been posting a lot of Smiths videos on Twitter lately, and his keyboard sounds reveal his romantic tendencies. “SA DUB 8” is embellished by rosy Yamaha DX-7 arpeggios seemingly ripped from an ’80s adult-contemporary ballad, while the gorgeous echoing piano that’s become something like Atobe’s signature works overtime on “SA DUB 7.” “SA DUB 5” might not be as woozy or mysterious as some of Atobe’s earlier beatless tracks, but each individual chord blossoms like a time-lapse of a budding flower as a ticklish TB-303 floats deep in the mix. Little staticky rustles and hisses find their way into the spaces between the drums, and every now and then we hear brief samples of female voices that sound like they were recorded through a phone speaker held up to a mic. These idiosyncratic touches bring variety and a splash of sentimentality to a record that might otherwise come off as a formal experiment.
In the past, Atobe’s music often proceeded from an alien logic. At its most extreme (2014’s Butterfly Effect2016’s World), his music sounds more like something naturally formed, or washed up on a beach, than made by human hands. Atobe’s press-shyness and the 13-year gap between Ship-Scope and Butterfly Effect have only fueled his mystique, leading to speculation about when (and even by whom) the music on his post-hiatus releases was made. Discipline strips away any such mystery, displaying his music’s logic up on the board for all to see. There’s nothing here that seems to have made its way into the music by accident, and the record is happy to stake out a small patch of musical territory rather than proceeding from the apparently unlimited thickets of Atobe’s imagination. But within these narrow parameters is a riot of skill and invention, with just enough of a glimpse into the obsessions of the man behind the music to make it feel like Atobe’s most personal record yet.
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