Ellen Allien Sool

Ellen Allien has been carving out electronic meanderings reflective of the electronic scene in Berlin since she founded her label Bpitch Control in 2001. While her last album Orchestra of Bubbles (with Apparat) was an impeccable dance floor raven put forth like a product syndicate for IDM, Sool leaves the accesible groove of its predecessor for the minimal criterion that hid within it. Sool is decisively Allien’s first record cultivated primarily around minimal electronic, a style vastly prominent within her label. As a dusk-laden sound often utilized as an elusive foundation for groove, Sool decisively steps outside the box.

Imprinted on the inside of the album’s digipak, Allien exclaims “Sool is a planet far away, I want to live on. But beware of underbelly life. Because where is light, there is darkness.” Allien aurally launches into this concept with the first track Einsteigen (German for “boarding”), which serves as the introduction to the album. Filled with steadily increasing sounds of the hub-up of urban life (shoes shuffling, elevators dinging, conversational jargon: the audio version of high-speed film clips evoking the routine of daily life), Allien breaches a beat which jumps around the track instead of leading it. The song ends with the sound of a machine shutting down; like the final goodbye to the outside world as you board an airtight shuttle departing for, well – Sool.

Less than half the tracks on the album have a beat that acts as the controlled variable for the song (namely Elphine, Its, MM and Out); with Elphine being the only one that could be said to approach a groove. The album’s only real brush with melodic structure is on the track Frieda, where Allien’s dreamy vocals sail over ambient waves and gentle guitar. This is the closest the album gets to conventional instrumentation. For the most part, Sool utilizes stark beats, trimmed vocal samples, wispy soundscapes, and glitchy sounds akin to the functioning of machines.

Caress bellows its introduction like a machine forcing steam into a deep space soundscape, spearheading toward the vacuum that so evocatively becomes the album’s backdrop. The song builds over the beat of a stylized high-speed metronome as the song title shoots out periodically in computerized intonation. The irony of Caress (and in turn, Sool at large) is that the beat is not the foundation for the track, but instead an element within it. Bim begins with sounds akin to a Pong tournament and Sprung is initiated by scampering high-pitched sounds reflective of a science center activity station generating a wall of flashing illuminated tiles.

In deconstructing the concept of cultivating songs out of a beat; Allien pushes the envelope on minimal and intensifies the breadth of her album. The tight aural filigree that results is such a unified sonic fabricwork that, yes - it seems worthy of conceptualizing a planet. The departure from minimal to Sool.