There is a particular kind of patience to Daisuke Tanabe’s career. Not the patience of someone waiting for the right moment, but of someone entirely absorbed in the work itself, indifferent to the timelines the music industry tends to impose. It has been eleven years since his last full-length solo album, and the record that has emerged in the interim is worth every year of it.
Hole on Layers is Tanabe’s first solo album since Floating Underwater in 2014, released on Borrowed Scenery, the label he co-founded with Yosi Horikawa. Across twelve tracks, he works through odd time signatures, shifting rhythms and off-beat grooves that move from gentle pulses to something more propulsive, always with the textural precision that has distinguished his work since the beginning. It is electronic music with a physical quality to it — beats that feel like objects in space rather than patterns on a grid.
Tanabe first came to wider attention when his debut EP drew support from Gilles Peterson, Ben Watt and others who recognised something genuinely unusual in his approach. Dancing Turtle released his EP After Few Layers Before in 2008 — a limited edition double 7-inch on gatefold vinyl, six tracks of downtempo-electronica that set out exactly what he was capable of. In the years since, he has worked through collaborations and shorter releases, including the long-running kidsuke project with Kidkanevil, building a quiet body of work that has sustained a devoted audience without ever chasing a wider one.
Hole on Layers feels like both a continuation and a consolidation of everything that has followed. The album was released on Borrowed Scenery, a label that reflects his independent instincts — releasing on his own terms, with his own collaborators, on a schedule that answers to no one. That approach has always been part of what makes the music what it is.
Hole on Layers is out now. Listen and purchase via Bandcamp.
