Kimochi is somewhat of a rarity in today's climate of dance music advertising, publicity and social media firestorms. It's a low-key label that has earned a dedicated following by releasing consistently high-quality, deep electronic music on vinyl. Each of its EPs has the feel of an art object. Kimochi's founder, Max, keeps a low profile, despite travelling the world as a DJ.

Though we both live in the Chicago area, Max and I meet at a Japanese-style tea room on a spring day in Berlin, a city he's been visiting for a decade. Max (who won't share his last name or age) is wearing a dark sweater, cargo pants and a knit cap, with a pair of Sony studio headphones around his neck. Max is better known in Chicago by his DJ name m50. He has been host of etc radio on university station WNUR since the '90s. For nearly seven years he wrote for Gramaphone Records' blog, Phonologue, and now he works at the shop one day a week.

Max founded Kimochi in 2010 as a way to release his own music under the pseudonym Area. "I didn't have any money," he recalls. "So I did a Kickstarter." Max sold personalized copies of records he had created for other labels, ultimately raising $900 to fund his label's first release.

Kimochi's sound, artwork and even the record pressings themselves are deeply intertwined. Its releases range from dub techno and deep house to more abstract and ambient compositions. The common thread is an immersive, dreamlike quality that encourages dedicated listening.

Many of the Kimochi EPs are pressed on colored vinyl with locked loops hidden in the run-out grooves—usually bonus beats or mysterious vocal samples. Each record is issued on limited-edition, numbered vinyl (typically 200 or 300 copies) with beautiful hand-painted labels and sleeves. Aaron Shinn (cofounder of August Uncommon Tea) designed a low-cost yet visually stunning printing technique using laser-cut stencils and multi-color spray-paint gradients. The bold colors and varied geometric shapes, often evocative of natural shapes like plants or clouds, reflect the spirit of the music, which eschews blocky loops in favor of shifting layers.

"I paint each of the records," Max explains. "With the Dead Fader record, that was four or five hits [of paint] per record, and we did 200 records. Each one has to dry, ideally, for half an hour at least in between each of the steps for that." This labor-intensive process is one of the reasons for the label's limited runs. Max jokes, "I have a well-ventilated space!"

Max soon expanded the label to feature other artists, releasing three dozen records to date. With a few notable exceptions (Brendon Moeller, David Moufang and Benjamin Brunn) most of the producers featured on Kimochi are lesser known. They hail from all over the world, including Russia, Croatia, Sweden, Germany, Italy and the UK.

Zachary Lubin is a Chicago DJ Max admires, one of the first he heard on moving to the area. His EPs feature deep, hypnotic techno, bringing back memories of Midwest raves. "Kimochi offers perhaps the greatest artistic freedom beyond my own label (Obvio), and it is because there are no expected boundaries," Lubin tells me. "It encourages full exploration and revealing of one's pure, core artistic identity. For me, Kimochi is one of the most innovative labels because of this defining characteristic. Each release is carefully immersed in love and thoughtful curation, from the arrangement of the compositions to the final artwork and vinyl format presentation. Each release is something special.... [Kimochi] always brings out my most personal and vulnerable works, and that is exhilarating as an artist."

Justin James, who makes music as Dreamlogicc and runs the label Main Drain Studios, recently moved from Chicago to California. His downtempo IDM Podval EP is named after a secretive Chicago gathering. "With Max, I send a steady stream of songs throughout the year, regardless of whether I'm trying to seek out a home for them. Over time, Max ends up with a small group of songs that, despite often being made years apart, feels 'just right,'" James explains via email. "I think there is a sense of earnestness that comes through in many Kimochi records. To me, Kimochi records often feel massive yet delicate, with an energy and propulsion that often belie their miles-deep undercurrents."

Dig further into the Kimochi catalog and you'll find music from Airliner Series, a little-known alias of Finnish artist Lassi Nikko, and WaWuWe, a pseudonym of the Swedish artist Sebastian Mullaert. Then there's Dead Fader, real name John Cohen, who lives in Brighton, England. "Max was the first person I met that I felt so comfortable with to literally send everything I'd ever made," Cohen recalls via email. "He had the patience and interest to go through all the pieces of music that I thought weren't useable. And actually that was a massive point of learning for me, too, to be honest. It gave me the freedom to step back a bit from the selection process and just focus on what I wanted to do, which was just to make lots of tracks."

Max characterizes Kimochi regulars UD as a "secretive project," but a few clicks on Discogs bring up You Dee, an early alias of SUED's founders Stefan Wust (SW) and Sven Rieger (SVN). UD's Adapt, Adapting and Adapted EPs border on IDM, exposing one of Max's major influences. Asked to describe Kimochi's sound, Max says, "In general, there's a focus on rawness and texture." The word "kimochi" means feeling. Max works closely with his artists to select music that is deeply meaningful to them.

In 2016, Max spun off a Kimochi sub-label, Tesuji, which features many of the same artists but presents a harder edge. Tesuji is a forward-thinking move in Go, the ancient Chinese board game that involves strategically capturing territory.

After tea, Max guides me through some of his favorite sights in Hermannplatz. He takes me to a beloved falafel stand, explaining how it moved from a larger location and its cook buys her ingredients from the local farmer's market. He describes a couple of difficult recent DJ gigs: one where the opening DJ had studied him so closely he played many of the cuts Max had brought, the other where the club owner expected Max to spin fast, pounding techno all night, seemingly unaware of his label or records.

From the outset of our interview, it's clear Max has mixed feelings about being featured in the press. "There's this social media pressure to make a story about everything—package your life into, 'What's your narrative, what kind of person are you,' and sometimes it can seem kind of crass when you take something that's a really personal thing to you... and then you go on this press junket," Max explains. "Part of the process of putting together a record can be really personal, but we don't do that whole other side, so it kind of frees you up."

According to Max, this philosophy goes beyond the cliché of letting the music speak for itself. "Even the name that you record under isn't so important," he says. "The important thing is to be able to do what you want, and if you feel confined in having to package it a certain way, it's better not do that part and better to make something that really is important to you."

Max insists the details of his life are boring. He grew up "moving around in Canada" before settling in Chicago for school, then "bounced around different departments" at Northwestern University, eventually working there as a means to access the music technology program as a non-major.

These days, Max receives a plethora of demos from other artists for both his label and his radio show, and he listens to them. "There's a lot of people doing really exciting work," he says. "[But] there's this funnel where there's only a few outlets and it's easy to feel boxed out of it, even for pretty accomplished artists."

Eventually Max and I wander towards Hard Wax in Kreuzberg. Max points out a mannequin on a DDR-era apartment balcony and a spot where he once randomly observed an artist, wine glass in hand, playing a grand piano in the street. A boat passes on the canal, blasting reggae. Max's attention to detail and his eye for the unusual is captivating. He enthuses about the variety of Berlin nightlife, how even as it's always changing, there can be three events worth attending in a single night.

Max posits that one of the key roles of a record label is providing a context through which to hear the artist's music. "That's what you try and do as a DJ or what you try and do as a critic. You're saying, 'Hey, check this out, this is how it makes sense,'" Max says. "Because if you listen to it in the wrong way, it doesn't make any sense." Through Kimochi, Max hopes to reveal qualities he perceives in each artist's music that the rest of the world hasn't figured out yet.

When he was only releasing his own music, Kimochi relieved Max from a fear of failure. He wants to grant the same gift to other artists. "I have one rule of thumb for the label," Max declares. "A record has to be good enough that I don't care if it sells. That's it."

Label of the month mix

A truly unhinged affair from Kimochi affiliate DJ LGCC, who careens from footwork to sound collage via the likes of Busta Rhymes and Reel Big Fish.