Some record labels, particularly in electronic music, loom so large that they threaten to eclipse the names on their roster. That was the case for Chain Reaction, the Berlin-based outfit helmed by Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald. Chain Reaction was founded in 1995 as a successor to the duo’s eponymous imprint, and though legendary names emerged from beneath its umbrella—Porter Ricks, Monolake, Vladislav Delay, Shinichi Atobe—it felt less like a showcase for individual acts than a collective effort to mold the nebulous entity known as dub techno into a coherent shape, to guide its evolution.

The records themselves contributed to that impression. The boldface “CHAIN REACTION” was emblazoned in all caps across the center stickers of each record, far larger than the artists’ names. The uniform design of the 12"s, with their chipboard cut-out sleeves, reinforced the idea that each record was but a chapter in a much larger story, while the CDs came packaged in die-stamped aluminum cases whose industrial aesthetic suggested machine-made sounds rolling off the assembly line. The label’s anonymizing impulse reached its apotheosis in the alias chosen by one of its earliest acts: Various Artists.

Anyone who came into contact with Hallucinator’s first three 12" EPs in 1998 and 1999, or the subsequent compendium Landlocked, would almost certainly have approached them in the context of Chain Reaction’s founders and community of likeminded artists. Hallucinator stuck to the shadows; the press release for their debut EP read, “HALLUCINATOR are 3 people from the UK/London and this [is] their first release ever—that’s all what the artists want to let us know.” There was no information to connect the members of the trio (Anna Piva, Edward George, and Trevor Mathison) to their related projects: the arts collective Flow Motion, whose contemporaneous work explored the cosmological implications of dub and Sun Ra, and the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of avant-garde multimedia artists and filmmakers, founded in 1982, engaged in diasporic studies and postcolonial theory.

However Hallucinator’s music found its way to Chain Reaction, it’s not hard to understand why Ernestus and von Oswald found kinship with them; the trio’s work takes up the baton from Basic Channel and their acolytes and grinds it to splinters. “People,” the song that opens both Hallucinator’s debut 12" and Landlocked, floats atop the kind of slow-fast dub rhythm that you might have found on a Porter Ricks record; the vibes are appropriately hazy, washed-out synths and onionskin delay smeared together like overlapping radio signals beamed from far, far away. But certain key elements of the sound are subtly different from their peers: The clattering hi-hats sound more like scraps of live jazz than programmed drum machines, and the kick drum studiously avoids the downbeat, fluttering like a heart murmur.

Hallucinator proceed to complicate the picture across the album’s next few tracks. “Black Angel” chops shadows and static into a lumbering dub behemoth, eschewing conventionally musical sounds in favor of dark, unruly smudges. It thumps away without obvious variation for more than 10 minutes, but the length feels arbitrary; once you’ve sunk into its morass, it might as well be endless. “Red Angel,” which sounds uncannily like what Dettinger was doing around the same time, is more delicate, unspooling crystalline clicks and cricket-like trills into a long, undulating epic that feels like a storm reflected in a disco ball—an explosion of small, square spangles of gray.

“Phebes” and “Goldcoast” are faster and ravier; the tranced-out arpeggios of the former recall helicopter rotors, while the latter fashions a peak-time, proto-Berghain stomp out of glittery mulch. In their degraded, distorted palette and perilous timekeeping, both of them anticipate Burial’s skin-of-the-teeth method of collaging together rhythm tracks with scant concern for the disciplining grid. But in between those two chaotic cuts, Hallucinator take a surprisingly traditional detour via “Sethos,” a slow-motion steppers’ dub foregrounding leathery hand drums.

Following a pair of short, sketch-like tracks (“Dusk” and “Moonshot”) more in keeping with the classic ambient dub of the early 1990s, Hallucinator set out for unknown territory in the album’s closing sequence. “Wipeout I,” “Recall (Wipeout II),” and “Rocket,” all exclusive to the album, strip away the drums to plunge into a maelstrom of hissing noise, grinding feedback, and, in the case of “Rocket,” roiling, overdriven synth riffs. Taken together, the three tracks suggest an unexpected link to the industrial music of the 1970s and ’80s, along with the electronic proto-punk of Suicide. “Hallucinator,” a track from their debut EP, concludes the album with an even more explicitly industrial experiment—10 minutes of churning, grayscale loops and unsettling bursts of noise.

As much as Hallucinator chose to let the music speak for itself, they did offer one crucial clue to more worldly concerns: In the press release for their debut EP, they dedicated the music to the memory of Stephen Lawrence, a Black Londoner, just 18 years old, who had been attacked and murdered by a group of knife-toting white assailants in 1993. Such a dedication was unusual for Chain Reaction, whose world-building typically remained purely imagistic, like the nautical fixations of Porter Ricks or the airy abstractions of Vainqueur. However subtle, Hallucinator’s emphasis on social justice is a reminder that even the most fantastical sounds are a part of the real world, and the lived experience of the people in it.

As students of dub, Hallucinator knew that reggae was an island music shaped by centuries of trade and slavery; the title Landlocked may have been a nod to the UK’s own insular culture and post-colonial legacy. Though their music was superficially connected to the utopian currents of rave culture and the pan-European idealism of the late 1990s, the back half of the trio’s album captures a seething unease. Hallucinator were never as well known as many of their Chain Reaction peers, but this new reissue of their sole album is proof that their name deserves a place in dub techno’s pantheon—not just as genre pioneers, but also as artists who channeled history’s hidden currents into music that remains powerfully confrontational, three decades later.