"XLR8R 15-Year Anniversary Party"
Allien Worlds
Berlin techno producer Ellen Allien steers to innerspace.
XLR8R 15-Year Anniversary Party""> The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 abruptly offered sizable options for euphoric electronic music fans. Formerly grayed-out factories-turned-clubs played host to a flush of activity. Warehouse spaces cheap, plentiful, and relatively unpoliced bulged with the exaggerated frequencies of industrial dub, electro-tech, and Big Room chords. From this rerouted infrastructure emerged producers such as Nina Hagenloving, subtlety-layering Ellen Allien. An active DJ for more than 15 years and BPitch Control labelhead for almost a decade, she has ridden a vanguard of pleated synths and aspirating percussion that has gone from emphatic to increasingly minimal, yet remains vital.Alliens 2001 debut album, Stadtkind, was part affirmation, part declaration. Coming a decade after her DJ career began, it was as romanticized as it was corporeal, a rugged album where I was saying, Respect my lifestyle, she says by phone from her Berlin apartment. Allien soon found herself doing more interviews, explaining to journalists the impact Berlins freeform living had on her; the crisp clip of her second album 2003s Berlinette reflected that geographical vision. Two years later, Thrills came on the heels of even more traveling. It is about the thrill in any club, or of just making music, she reflects. Now, having conveyed her unbridled, analog-addled side, Allien looks back inward with Sool, her fourth full-length (not including a 2006 collaboration with Sascha Apparat Ring or several mix CDs).
Indeed, Sool seems deliberately arranged to introduce listeners to Alliens redirected, digitally incubated mindset. The album opens with the beat-free Einsteigen (Enter), a simultaneous stylistic departure and arrival imbued with the chatter of trains and dissipating crowds. Following are 10 tracks, co-produced with AGF (aka Berlins Antye Greie, known for fibrous tone poems) that eschew the immediacy of Alliens jukebox-educated melodies and galvanic drum contortions in favor of highly ionized drifts. Much of Sool is sheathed within asymmetrical grafts of conductive dermis, underneath which luminescent capillaries of rhythm dilate. While a good deal of Europe is embracing the full-body flush of deep house, Allien has pulled back, microediting expressionistic apparitions collected on the streets of Bordeaux to Tokyo and then mulled over until they become intonations.
Now I spend half the week not in Berlin, and I try to understand and respect cultures by learning them from their people, Allien says. Sool is the world you see by yourself, and [that allows you] to show people there is always a dark side. Its also a planet I would love to live on, a dream world, the way I wish it could be. The first album just came out, but since then its been concepts; Im a big fan of structures.
Accordingly, there have been changes in Alliens DJ sets as well, which now incorporate structured ambiguity. But Allien is finding clubs are open to a style that is equally bassline-oriented and the sound of bytes regurgitated. She cites DJ-producers such as fellow Berliner Ricardo Villalobos as leaders of feminine sets more measured and tribal, who no longer have to conform to hot trances pace. Allien is perfectly capable of peak-hour banging. But following a period of psychological introspection (and after reading a few too many depressing rock autobiographies), she now leans toward a compounding mix of post-hedonism recesses that shun dictatorial emotions. And Sool reflects this, its shifting filaments neither too rigid nor too slack.
Maybe my music is sometimes melancholic because of Berlin, but I dont want to put my shit directly on people, Allien says. I want to make them think, give them a peak to jump from they can decide whether to jump up or down, be happy or sad, where they can take their own life.
Anchoring holographic treble with reverberant bass, Alliens is the voice of an international clubbing subsect that often foregoes words for meaning.
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