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Ellen Allien & Apparat, "Orchestra Of Bubbles"
Bubbles is justwhat I had hoped for this collaboration, only a debut in the most officialsense as Allien and Sascha Ring (Apparat) have been working together and sideby side for several years, on remixes, each other’s records, and helping runtwo of Berlin’s best label’s, Bpitch Control and Shitkatapult. I’ve heard both artists evolve over the pastfive years and become more similar in sound.Apparat began with the surprisingly solid, if busy andWarp-nostalgic IDM of early 12” singles like “Multifunktionsebene,” moving latertowards a beautiful synthesis of his stark beat-mastery and newer melancholygenerated by real horns and vocals (see 2002’s numbing “Pressure”). Ring’s healthy obsession with computermalfunction, coming out in his song titles (“Warm Signal,” “Bugs and Fixes”),references his heavy use of frantic IDM breaks and glitch, but differs fromAutechre’s or Aphex’s tech-babble in the humanity and humorous nostalgia of itspresentation. For me, the craggy,sculpted beats of an Apparat track, for all of their continually impressivetechnical ability, always seemed little more than the foil for the granular,melodic washes underneath, the most derivative and predictably sentimentalparts, but also the most grabbing. Itwas as if Ring were trying for these moments of simple emotional suspension,but felt the need to brace it all behind flashy geometry.
The biggest redirection in Allien’s history thusfar has beenthe introduction of the glitch, or ‘micro-processed’ aesthetic, arrivingalongside her most explicit flirtation with the pop format on 2003’s Berlinette. It’s still her most intricately ‘tweaked’record, the one most adaptable to any listening situation because there is somuch sonic interaction to scatter attention, and also the one with the mostpersonality, nostalgia, and similarity to the technically-obsessed music ofApparat. Allien backed away considerablywith last year’s Thrills, an albumthat seems to me now, rather than the ‘album’ albums of Berlinette and Bubbles,more like of an experimentation with style, an admittedly addictive opportunityfor Ellen to fully indulge Berlinette’shidden borrowings from classic and dated techno, trance, and even industrialtracks in efforts not to revive but to recreate with a Bpitch logo: broad-stroked,coarsely homemade, but also supercool in both technical ability and relevancyof mood.
On their new collaboration, Allien and Ring combine thedetail-orientedness and mood-primacy of late Apparat and Berlinette with the party-borrowing mood of Thrills. There are severalvocal tracks, mining the ambient techno/IDM/indietronic vibe found on Apparat’s2003 album Duplex or a Múm or Morrlabel record, but there’s also a great track in the grime style (“Metric”),some spacey, just-subtle-enough electro tracks, and songs like “Retina,” basedon live-sounding string loops and pinging, bubbling electronic noise; songswhere you can hear the insistence of the minimal melodic parts Allien does sowell, meshing beautifully with Ring’s rhythmic abstractions. The blatant trance-y melodic parts, thedistorted guitar chugging, the acidic bass parts that appeared on Berlinette and Thrills are here again in gorgeous subtle integration, an ease reflectedin the album sequencing. Bubbles is simply an immediatelyinvolving, fresh sounding song cycle of electronica, old and brand new, that’sgetting better with each half and full listen. My one qualm exists with the vocal parts which are a littledisappointing probably only in that I’m so accustomed and addicted thespeak-singing method Allien primarily uses. The new, slower and more fragile timbre of her voice suites the ambienttechno-styled tunes it accompanies, just not my stubborn ear, yet. In consolation, I can say that Ring’s onevocal does sound better than those appearing on Duplex.
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