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Thorsten Profrock Biography

thorsten-profrock
  • Born:
  • Years Active: 1990s
  • Genre: Rock & Alternative

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, Rovi

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