christopher de la Torre

Anyone in their right mind can feel how Ellen Allien’s uncompromising presence during one of her shows makes her the sort of new club diva we’ve all been waiting for: a sultry, sexy creature not at all worried about mainstream predictability. Allien’s brand of minimal has been anything but sensible; up until now, her sound has teetered on the lip of insane, perhaps giving us some suggestion of normality amidst the calculated throng of pulsations some might consider ’music.’

But with Sool, we see something different, a radical change in the electronic atmosphere; the album follows a sort of narrative, a projected image that ebbs and flows with various combinations of elastic sound. This music is alive.

I slip in the disc, put my headphones on and turn the volume up. What makes Sool an experience worth every second is its stripped and seamless core – a new type of clinical abstraction – a post-post modern dissection of what we hear as music. Transported into a future dominated by ones and zeroes and mechanical, moving parts, we can envision a new landscape of consciousness. If there is anything reflected by the natural course of Minimal as a genre, it is our obsession with anatomy, with the insides of things, in tandem and frequency – a sort of perverted simplicity, the quest to find the lowest common denominator.

We enter the album with “Einsteigen,” which literally means ’to get into/out of,’ materializing us into a sterile, stripped room; we have just left the safety of the womb. In “Caress,” we see the sun, traversing the vacuum of space to mix and match up molecules, light years away. “Bim” envisions the genesis of life, clumsy and awkward, straining for mobilization, for a means of procreation. The playful progression of “Sprung” is like a transitional period – the adolescence of the album. Maturity kicks in with “Elphine,” a tale of full mobility and exploration, dark curiosity covered with candy. We reach a moment of introspection with “Zauber,” and one of lost innocence in “Its.” As we plunge into an unknown atmosphere, “Ondu” gives us the ecology of this new world: heavy electric impulses – the producers – quicken below a transparent mask of machines and waves of percussion, like lubricant, guiding us beneath an artificial heartbeat and into the void beyond. Once we reach the central organ – “Frieda” – we are reminded that even machines possess the capacity to love. Soft, innocent vocals pluck the heartstrings we find there.

Allien’s musical soul hides the perfect love: a transient scape of desire, jubilation and experimentation. Luckily for us, the experience far exceeds that of mainstream music, keeping its own replication pleasantly out of reach.

Extras

• My review of Sool on Edge
  
• My Edge review of Ellen Allien’s Boogybytes 4
• Thoughts after Ellen Allien show at Studio B