Thorsten Profrock's
dub production-style approach to
techno results in the innovative style of acoustically composed
electronic music that has made him one of the more important producers in Chain Reaction's stable of ambitious artists. Along with other
techno-savvy youths such as
Rene Lowe,
Profrock gravitated quickly toward
Moritz von Oswald and
Mark Ernestus' Hard Wax record store in Berlin at the beginning of the 1990s. There he reveled in the store's deep collection of imported
chicago house,
detroit techno, and dub reggae records. It wasn't long before he found himself one of the store's employees in 1994 while studying economics at Humboldt University. Soon the ambitious atmosphere of the record store -- propelled by
von Oswald and Ernestus' recordings as
Basic Channel and
Maurizio -- eclipsed
Profrock's interest in economics; like his peers, he wanted to produce
electronic music. With the demise of the
Basic Channel label in 1994 and the birth of the Chain Reaction label at Hard Wax in 1995,
Profrock found an avenue for his music. For the second release on the label, he released a record as
Various Artists titled 1-7. These seven tracks found
Profrock taking the same sort of revisionist view of
techno that
Basic Channel had explored the year before and that his peers would soon take on successive releases. Moving away from the 808 and 909 percussion and the synth and 303 riffs of Chicago and Detroit,
Profrock made
techno from new ingredients, favoring sequenced bass lines and other dark sounds that he would manipulate with his mixing board, just as Jamaican
dub producers had done many years earlier. He continued his exploitation of delay and reverb effects on two successive Chain Reaction records -- Resilent and Erosion -- before compiling his work on the Decay Product album, proving that
techno could indeed be a live sound rather than strictly a computerized cut-and-paste formula. ~ Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide