But the drawbacks to this anonymity are audible: isolation, the sense of being dwarfed by logo. Worst of all, the world isn't hearing the amazing music that's been emerging from Berlin since 1995. All the breakthroughs the label has made into a tantalising, elusive, endlessly compelling strain of electronic music by artists such as Vainqueur, Various Artists, Monolake, Substance and Porter Ricks, risk going unnoticed. Yet like the music of its host organism, the Basic Channel label (see The Wire 150), Chain Reaction's releases seep slowly through the brakes media silence imposes on breaks, erode resistance and work their way into the public consciousness.

No one's quite sure whether Chain Reaction music is House or Techno or dub. Actively exploring its own sound illogic has the side effect of derealising the belief structures which coagulate around these old formats New sounds create new emotional spectrums, exerting a forcefield which dissolves the solidity of scenes, drawing you away from clubland, back to the living room and the headphones, then generating new dancefloors with a characteristic mix of indifference and antagonism towards older paradigms.

Chain Reaction's image is anonymous and the music is characteristically mystifying. Nothing blocks this confusion. No pictures or interviews act as future shock absorbers; the full force of their inexplicable sounds falls around your ears. The listener wanders through an acoustic space.

Chain Reaction operates from a third floor office in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. The groundfloor is occupied by Hard Wax, the specialist shop for Chicago, Detroit and UK imports that became the nerve centre of the city's nascent Techno scene in the early 90s. Marusha, Westbam, DJ Hell, Paul Van Dyk - crossover DJs, who wouldn't come within spitting distance of each other now - would all crowd into the shop to hear new 12"s by Underground Resistance (UR) or Blake Baxter. Around its walls, UR communiques, and faxes from Carl Craig's Retroactive label, form a glazed wallpaper. Out of Hard Wax, and the Detroit-Berlin Techno axis documented on the series of Tresor albums, emerged Basic Channel, the highly influential label/producer team run by Hard Wax's Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, aka Maurizio. When Techno had fossilised around specific sound machines, sounds and approaches, Basic Channel offered the way out of the impasse, and Chain Reaction was set up for its proteges to continue the work of dissolving Techno's fixity, bypassing the familiar formats, and generating the sweet confusion of the new.

Meanwhile, still acting as both trading post and meeting place, the Hard Wax shop has become a post-Techno gateway, opening out into dub, electroacoustics and two-step jungle, as well as the inspired Techno of former UR member Jeff MilIs. In fact, a self-sufficient ecology has developed in its building, linking the shopfloor to Chain Reaction and its satellite labels: Ernestus and von Oswald's reggae-inflected Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix; Imbalance, established by von Oswald to release more abstract electroacoustic works and now run by Monolake's Robert Henke; Din, run by Sasha Brauer and Various Artists' Thorsten Profrock. The building also houses the dubplate and mastering room, installed by Basic Channel so they could cut vinyl to Detroit standards. All these activities are independently interlinked, autonomous but related, detachable but connected.

Porter Ricks' Andy Mellweg used to run the mastering room, hut he and PP partner Thomas Köner have since spun off Chain Reaction's axis to join Achim Szepanski's Force Inc and Mille Plateaux labels. Yet, as its flagship unit, they're still its best known artists. Indeed, back in 1995, when Chain Reaction 12"s first started arriving in the UK, the label and duo seemed synonymous, as welded together as Aphex Twin and Warp or Jeff Mills and Axis. Every few weeks, Hard Wax prints a tipsheet and next to Porter Ricks would be the fervent review: "The group with the sovereign sound! A must!"

Pronouncing Porter Ricks is only the first pleasure of their three year project. Their name is an adventure of the mouth: "Port" winches open the lips, turns the tongue into a drawbridge across which the "Ricks" trundles like the wheels of an unknown trolley.

Thomas Köner cackles delightedly at this, extracting more humour from your words than you intended. His laughter doesn't build; it goes from nought to ten straight away and when he laughs, which is often, his mouth splits his face until the edges nearly meets his eyes. Black eyeliner ringed pupils stare straight at you with a disconcerting mixture of the measured and the manic. His animated presence seems completely at variance with the frozen soundscapes of the solo projects he currently runs alongside Porter Ricks.

Even in the climate-controlled foyer of the Forum, a former communist showpiece hotel situated in the bleak expanse of East Berlin's Alexanderplatz, the bracing January air forces everyone to keep their coats on. Andy Mellweg's white hair shoots out from his head with a startled force; he moves instantly into hi-intensity thought mode, talking about his twin loves of baroque music and architecture and polyrhythmic phase patterns, building bridges between the two obsessions in the urgent sotto voce of a man who can't bear to be bored for an instant.

The origin of the duo's project name turns out to be far more down to earth: Porter Ricks was the skipper in the 70s delphin movie Flipper. "A friend asks us how we work together," Mellweg explains. "Well, in the background of the film is a scene where Porter Ricks tracks signal tones in the water to call Flipper, and Thomas said, 'Yes, that's the same procedure. Andy makes synth tones and I filter the sounds and design the sounds with my system.' "

"In some cuts," Thomas continues, "there was Porter Ricks just looking for Flipper. He was in some remote bay and had this underwater gear, and so he was just sending synthesizer sounds, synthetic sounds into the water. And nothing happened. This was his main job in this film. It was very cheap kind of garbage, like a honking horn [he quacks happily several times], but... no result. I thought, this is what music making is about: you make strange noises into the biggest space you could imagine, which is this human culture or the sea... and nothing happens. He was such a good man. He was really very honest and clear, and at the end of the film there was his name - Porter Ricks. After that, it was so clear what to do."  

Each Porter Ricks single is a ship that pulls into a port and docks there for its duration. With Porter Ricks, you imagine unknown engines, overhead monorails, deep sea submersibles, fantasies of turning into a big ship, its prow cutting through the waves. From The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" to Bob James's "Nautilus" to Air's "Moon Safari", unexplored sonic worlds compel the producer to invent an ark. From its portholes you see the world.

Singles like "Port Of Transition"/"Port Of Call" and "Port Of Nuba"/"Nautical Nuba" are set between land and sea, with sounds travelling across water in a harbour acoustic. "We have in our studio a nice illuminated globe and we always had the water parts to the front," says Köner. "Therefore when you do a mix, you look to the right and see Port Gentil, for example. Just look in your atlas, it exists."

Their third release "Nautical Dub (Tidal Mix)" / "Port Gentil" is where the duo realised that souvereign sound promised in Hard Wax's tipsheet. Recorded in April 1995 and released in January 1996, Mellweg and Köner produced a shrouded, baffled, fogged electronic music that leaves you lost and unsure of what you're hearing. "For us the sound, colour and timbre are really part of the process", explains Köner. "It's really a developing piece. With the "Nautical Dub", a lot of things have been done with the bass drum so the whole bass pulsation is kind of pitch-transposed and delayed, and this makes it really organic. This is attractive for us. It has a special organic feeling, it's kind of homegrown."

Every PR track is a live mix: "The first take is a kind of try out, the second take is then the first take," Köner continues. "The mixing is for me the ultimate approach to musical creation. When I'm starting to mix I'm so totally clear, I would not even speak of concentration, because there is no topic of concentration. It's just that I'm there in this sound."

Mellweg and Köner met while working as sound engineers at the Rozar post-production studio in Dortmund. Back then, their approaches were drastically opposed. Köner was "totally on a zero point, zero Kelvin" while Mellweg was "totally hypercomplex". In the 70s, such a duo would have been stranded between the worlds of jazz and classical music. Chain Reaction was a window into "the open system of whole dancefloor culture". But now there is a divergence between the duo and the label. Köner elaborates: "We had so much inspiration, so much love and enthusiasm in our work, but Chain Reaction said, 'Ooh, it's too much, too much, too fast and so wait, wait and...' Of course for a time we wait. But then you ask yourself 'Why? Why shall I wait?' And there was no answer for us, so we were forced to look for other things, totally forced. There was no chance to release music. We had no space to unfold our capacity."

Their final Chain Reaction release was the label's first CD, Biokinetics, which fused 12" tracks and remixes into a seamless whole. Post-Chain Reaction, the submarine syntharmonics of "Redundance 5", from their double pack 12" released on Force Inc, was a revelation. Köner points to the sleeve of the duo's self-titled 1997 CD released by Force Inc's sister label, Mille Plateaux. With its "polyphonic and multicolour" photon streaks, it couldn't be more distinct from Chain Reaction's hard-edged design minimalism. "I understand their policy," explains Köner, "the idea of the company as a kind of corporate identity, which of course must follow certain forms of appearance in public. But we must say we are not interested in corporate identity at all."

Mellweg adds quietly, "It's pure dogmatism."

"The whole Achim Szepanski enterprise is much more conducive for us," resumes Köner, before commenting on Chain Reaction's metal CD packaging, which often damages the discs it's designed to protect. "We were never involved in the slightest discussion about its design. I would never agree to a box which kills my CD. This box is actively destroying CDs."

He taps the inner casing: "I don't think this is an active aggression against people who buy CDs, but it's a bit odd. I'm not happy with it."

On "Nautical Nuba", overlapping clicking sounds unbalance your hearing, which Mellweg describes as "an African dance with spears clicking". It's discomfiting patterns - loops phasing in and out of time - defeat your ears' attempts to supply the missing beat. Mellweg's fascination with polyrhythms dates back to Async Sense, the 1993 CD released by Robert Henke's Imbalance label. Async Sense electrifies polyrhythms or rhythmatizes frequencies: either way its inharmonic clicking patterns constrict and deceive, pulling focus as you click into pattern recognition mode.

"The perception of moving is the shifting of perspective," Mellweg explains. These phase patterns are one aspect of the larger co-evolutionary field of the tracks on Biokinetics. "When you shift your head, you shift rhythmic structure over the metronome. When the body is moving, it's a multiple rhythm, a polyperspectivism. The roots of dance are moving patterns from animals. In the Stone Age, people observed the animal patterns. For Thomas and me, dance is a procedure between natural moving forms of animals and humans."  

On an evening after the Hard Wax shop has closed, I talk with Rene Löwe, aka Vainqueur. January is a busy time for the Hard Wax staff, as new deliveries arrive throughout the day. One of the first of the Hard Wax inner circle, Löwe joined back in the early 90s, selling tracks alongside Ernestus and von Oswald when the shop was just a ground floor room a fifth of its current size, situated in Reichenberger Strasse, a kilometre from its present location.

"When I started DJing in 1990 Hard Wax was paradise for me, everything was there", recalls Löwe, who grew up in the communist German Democratic Republic. From 1992-95, Löwe DJed at the Waschhaus, a former washing machine factory in Potsdam, a Windsor-like Kaiser town just west of the Wall that used to hem in West Berlin. He met Ernestus and von Oswald when they played live at the Waschhaus in 1993. Vainqueur's debut 12" "Lyot" - the second release on von Oswald's M label - would become Basic Channel's club anthem.

Today, that era seems long ago. Like his friends, Peter Kuschnereit aka Substance (with whom he collaborated as Scion on a Chain Reaction 12") and Thorsten Profrock aka Various Artists, Löwe talks of Techno in the past tense. "You work in the store and every day you hear stuff with these functional sounds, 909, 808 stuff," he laments, "every day, every year, nothing changes anymore. Then you realise Techno definitely is not anymore. It's not really possible to change the sound of Techno. It's now 1998 and it's still like it was 96. So it was very important for us to do something which is not normal Techno."

Three years on, Chain Reaction continues to receive only very grudging feedback from other German Techno DJs. Löwe remarks: "It's strange, but we get more response from people more into Industrial or dub than from the Techno or House scene. But we don't have a problem with that anymore."

Löwe is preoccupied, burdened by his East German past. "When the Wall was opened, I got more and more into music because I could buy the records now. Before you couldn't buy anything. It was a very hard time for me because I was training for stuff that doesn't exist anymore in the West. In the East you never thought that you could lose your job, everything was planned for you."

After the Wall finally came down Mark Ernestus helped him to relocate in Post-unification Berlin. In the shortlived euphoria before the economic reality of paying for reunification kicked in, Techno flourished. In 1991-92 Detroit producers like Eddie Flashin' Fowlkes were regular visitors to the city. It was Fowlkes who taught Löwe how to set up a studio. Once it was up and running, Löwe decided to name his recording project Vainqueur, "because it is French for winner."

Precisely because of the frustrations of post-Wall life, Vainqueur's music is effortless, gliding, automotive. Löwe synthesizes soda siphon sounds from his Sequential machines. Everything is aerated. Jets of silver water spray your sensorium, wash your brain. All the struggle, obstruction and blockage have been sluiced away in a colonic irrigation that leaves you as buoyant as light itself. "I have to fight with my own personal problems to do the music", Löwe attests. "Last year I had to do civil duty [the pacifist's alternative to obligatory national service in Germany] and that blew me totally out of the business. It was always like a fight to do another track. To work in the studio was like to be in a place without any trouble, where you just could do what you like. Music is something you can control a bit more than other things. Most of the tracks are just like a loop, and this is the perfect loop which can run for hours."

For Löwe, the impact of unsyncopated rhythmachine momentum came as a revelation. He and Thorsten Profrock both talk about removing the hi-hats and the claps, thereby generating pulsations which avoid both ambience and beat. Sequential movement pulses between these two kinds of rhythmotion. You feel like a car or a passenger on an endless train ride. Sequences open corridors through your perception, iterating motifs, refracted mirrors.

"I did the whole CD with very small equipment," recalls Löwe, referring to his 1997 Chain Reaction CD Elevations. "When I did the first "Elevation" 12" in May 95, I had some normal drum sounds from an old sampling drum machine, a Sequential Studio 440, and then I realised the sequence is the thing of the track. Forget all drums. That was really important for me, because I never did before such an Ambient track. The first "Elevation" was very emotional. I just did it in three hours. I got completely carried away. I start with some drum patterns, played some sounds and then freaked out because the sound was really powerful, without any other percussive things, just the sound. Afterwards I realised more and more that is what I really like, you know, to just let the sounds run...

"For me," Löwe lyricises, "it's a bit like flying through the mountains or something. I really like northern territories like Norway. I really like this kind of nature, rough but beautiful, a little bit cold, but in the evening really clear."

Though he's describing his own process and result, Löwe has touched on the essence of Chain Reaction. By regulating and then reducing rhythm to sequences, to clicks, Chain Reaction producers can alter the metronome, as PR's Andy Mellweg says, nudge it, overlay it. Massive amounts of acoustic space are freed up. The CR producers open up the horizontal dimension of timbre and tone colour.

Like Rene Löwe, Various Artists' Thorsten Profrock has grown up as part of the Basic Channel ecology. He moved from buying to selling tracks at Hard Wax in 1994. And then, two years into an economics degree at Humboldt University, he started to produce his own tracks. It's a tightly interlocking network. He describes Mark Ernestus as a father and the Chain Reaction label as a brotherhood. All of them talk of groove while defining themselves in or against the dancefloor. If Rene Löwe is pessimistic about club life, Profrock has turned his back on it altogether for his Chain Reaction music. "It you quit club rhythms and DJ defined music, then you can go further into unbelievable things", he enthuses. "At this point we are interested in electroacoustic music and part of the electroacoustic scene is more interested in Techno music."

By using forgotten late 80s Sequential synthesizers and machines with an extreme attention to dub illogic and sound shaping, Basic Channel created sequences that were "rolling without an end" (as Substance's Peter Kuschnereit puts it). Profrock maps the way Basic Channel's pathway between Techno and non-club electronics attracted renegades like Porter Picks and the Monolake duo of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. "Basic Channel influenced a lot of people who never heard Techno before", he suggests. "Rene and I really talked a lot about music, about how to leave all these 909s and 808s behind, how to make music without percussion sounds, just replace the common claps, snares and hi-hats with other sounds; and Basic Channel defined what we were talking about."

At the end of 1997, Profrock released the Various Artists track "No.8", an awesome 20 minute echomaze of bending harpsichords and squashing celeste tones, on the UK's Fat Cat Records. "No. 8" was recorded in 1995 at the same time as his debut Chain Reaction release, "Various Artists 1-7". "You have these patterns and you have your mixing desk, it's just fun if you're creating these strange delays and reverbs," he explains. "I'm a bit of an addict to creating new delay patterns that kind of circle and feedback. I think that's why it sounds really human and organic, all these filtered delays. The end of "No. 8" - I'm really gone away with it. It's just a live flow."

Both the cold warmth of Profrock's 12 minute long "Resilent 1.2" (included on his recent Various Artists CD Decay Product), as well as the ear-occluding beauty of his "Erosion" track, are effectively versions of "No. 8", magnetic mirror mazes of synthetic dub. "All the tracks are mixed live, mainly unedited", he says. "It's just a live mix on the desk, like maybe dub producers have done their things. I think I'm working a bit like these guys, sitting in front of my mixing desk using the channels. I don't use any computers yet."

Profrock's fascination with effects echoes the obsession of Basic Channel's Ernestus and von Oswald with the 80s productions of the Bronx-based reggae producer Lloyd 'Bullwackie' Barnes. In the studio, Barnes would often run entire tracks through a graphic equalizer, softening the bass and exaggerating the mid-frequencies, sending the impact of the beat into a decay pattern, turning the voices of singers like Horace Andy or Wayne Jarrett into sepulchral trebles which would hover across the pulse, ebbing and flowing out of earshot. All these techniques inform the work of both the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction producers. As Thorsten Profrock says, "Dub was a kind of resonance to my soul because everything I like within Techno music, all these effects, these dub people had it. You see a line between dub and Basic Channel. If I listen to Wackie's sound, Wayne Jarrett, Horace Andy [or] these mid-70s recordings by Lee Perry or King Tubby or Prince Far, it's unbelievable."

"Reduce" is a key Chain Reaction process which recurs in the inverted commas of track titles. As terms like subtract, decay, reduce and extract suggest, feeding signals from Sequential synthesizers through the mixing desk's network of effects maintains sequence while deregulating pattern. The effect is compelling: your ear is always chasing what Monolake's Gerhard Behles calls the "tails of sound" (echoes of Basic Channel's rolling sequences without end). You never close on it or resolve it. Patterns disappear around the next corner and you follow stunned, ears searching for a resolution that never arrives. "I've taken away the functional things of dance music, the dance patterns even", a dandified Behles explains while reclining in the office chair at Chain Reaction HQ. "We invest more time in sound. The sound is so important and if you listen to it then you feel like there is nothing more to add to this track."

To all intents and purposes, Gerhard Behles and his Monolake partner Robert Henke don't play any instruments. Behles studied electronic music at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague, then at the electronic music faculty of Berlin's Technical University where he met Henke. Henke had studied "sound engineering at a film school, training in film sound recording, recording existing sounds and manipulating existing sounds."

With seven years in the electronic academia and one foot in the dance scene, Monolake have a double background that's rare in the UK, but not unfamiliar in Germany, where many people combine interminable university degrees with parallel careers.

If you look at the sleeve for "Occam" / "Arte", Monolake's latest single, released on the Din label, you see three suns suspended over a grey monolake, a setting as lunar as Drexciya's Bubble Metropolis craterscape. "The monolake is close to Yosemite National Park in California", explains Gerhard Behles. "The thing that is astonishing is that from out of this lake you have these stalactites growing..."

"Because it's very salty", interrupts Robert Henke. "It's got lot of minerals in it, so what you have are these structures of minerals. It has a very rough surface, like something not of the planet, but from outer space."

"The rocks are getting bigger and bigger because the water is getting less and less," Behles resumes. "Los Angeles draws all the water from the monolake."

Monolake's debut 12", "Cyan" / "Cyan 2", is set in an underwater sky, which merges sensations of swimming through the clouds with flying through the sea. Reverberation billows the sound until it shrooms and fogs. The track pilots you, places you in the windowseat looking down at the clouds. Almost inaudible looped birdsong dapples the ear with its intermittence. "We like what is happening to sound if you combine electronic or synthetic sounds with natural sounds," Henke says. "We want to integrate what comes from the outside and not throw it away with volume."

"That's like a very fascinating thing," Behles continues. "We often find there's much more correspondence than you might expect, between concrete sounds that we've just recorded in nature and towns, and the electronic sounds that we find; a much closer resemblance, in a way, than between concrete sounds and instrumental sounds as you may expect. "

Henke starts forward animatedly: "You can say, this is a flute sound and this is a bird sound, but a complicated, modulated sinewave can sound just as easily like a natural sound, so it's easier to merge natural sound and electronic sounds."

Monolake's recent Chain Reaction CD Hongkong is characterised by such shifts from naturally occurring rhythms to computerhythm music and back again. "The cicada is a rhythmic insect, but it's not 100 per cent tight," complains Behles. "You can hear it between [the CD tracks] "Lantau" and "Macao", this ccch-chh-chh, and sometimes it matches exactly our rhythm, and sometimes it's drifting, and sometimes it's matching again. This was a fascinating experience for us. You have the impression that these insects are grooving together with our beat."

Monolake are Chain Reaction's main digital maestros, the duo the other producers look up to. "We use Minimal Structure," explains Henke, "which is a Mac program which will just do minimal repetitive patterns. If you just jam on a minimal pattern and every now and then you change the pattern, but you don't change the sound/Song, you have very little to consider in terms of structure; rather, you can consider things in terms of sound, space or colour. What we do then is just play the studio, all the synths, all the editing, all the mixing, all the filtering, all the EQing, all the compression - that's the composition." These effects aren't added to the song afterwards, they are the song.

Henke issues his electroacoustic CDs of steady state sounds on the Imbalance label. Piercing Music was made for a sound installation which "gives you a special feeling if you enter the room, deep warmth with some kind of irritation in between." Floating Point is a remixed collection of fragments from 1992-97, drawing on a fascination with "the idea of water and randomly recurring natural sounds". A similar aesthetic feeds into the Hongkong CD. The modulating passage between the end of "Macao" and the beginning of "Arteis" is filled with bright splashes of water, recalling Jon Hassell's Aka-Darbari-Java. "The way every amplitude of the waves and every rising and falling merges together with the other sounds is 100 per cent intentional," says Henke. "I regard every movement within the waves as a kind of music."

"Working in a record store we know all types of structures in Techno, in electronic music," remarks Peter Kuschnereit. "It's a very ego type of trip you go through, it's not adapted to other stuff. Basic Channel taught us to be like that, to forget about all hypes." We're feeling the warm insulating throb of his latest Substance track, called "Scent", pulsing around the stripped walls of Hard Wax. Obsessed by Ash Ra Tempel guitarist Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 (an obsession shared by Basic Channel) and deeply impressed by Porter Ricks's downtempo "Redundance" singles, Kuschnereit deliberately set out to make "Scent" feel "very bright. Vainqueur is doing this as well, the string sounds, the voice of strings, it's a very light feeling. At that time I had a new girlfriend, a new flavour, a new scent."

As Hard Wax's House specialist, Kuschnereit is obsessed with the perfect loop. "It's possible to hold one groove at one point that you're really into it," he enthuses. He's far less pessimistic than Rene Löwe about late 90s clubland. He points to Jeff Mills and Claude Young as DJs who activate the forgotten Techno scratch style pioneered by Knights Of The Turntable back in the 80s. Wouldn't it be wild, I suggest, to hear three House DJs with three decks each, nine turntablists in a circle all playing Ron Trent's "Altered States"? "People are not doing experiments," says Peter "Maybe it's because it has to be a perfect mix all the time."

Rather then the perfect mix, Kuschnereit and the Chain Reaction producers search out alternating rhythms which make you doubt your mind, forget what you've heard, lose your train of thought, overhaul your sense of recognition. They refer to such sensations as patterns, and they engender such unknown feelings, it's intimidating. Listening to them, your emotions modulate out of shape, sliding across an unknown spectrum. Just as it took years to hear the endpoints of loops as loops, so the sequences they refer to are barely audible as sequences. They accentuate the effect by making each tone listenable in itself. In most Techno, inharmonic tones repel empathy, forcing you to move from individual sounds to patterns among sounds. Chain Reaction create adventures for the ears. The flight of the stylus across the vinyl triggers a chase through the headphones, a hazardous journey across the head.

Chain Reaction releases are distributed through SRD. Porter Ricks' Porter Ricks is out now on Mille Plateaux (through SRD). Hard Wax shop: Tel: 00 49 30 611 301 11, fax: 00 49 30 611 301 99