Zillablog

BPitch Control's Finest Looks on as "Dust" Settles

The BPitch Control mastermind is sharing her most recent, and most personal, efforts with the masses this month. Ellen Allien, remixer, DJ, producer, fashion designer, and label honcho, somehow found the studio time to follow up her 2008 release, Sool with Dust.

Dust can be characterized as an experimental album insofar as Ellen Allien is revered globally for producing and blending infectious, dancefloor-targeted music. This dismissing characterization, however, is short-sighted, failing to recognize her production skills and the inevitable urge to step outside the proverbial box. To be sure, disco- and tech-house make several cameos, sharing the spotlight with sparsely arranged techno and crunchy breakbeats.

What sets Dust apart is Allien's willingness to incorporate change within dance music's unwieldy frameworks. Her well-known approach to tracks recalls the seminal elements of dance music with a decidedly Detroit-meets-Berlin flair, but on Dust she uses this familiar ground as a launch pad for the pop-minded, string-and-vocal-driven "Sun the Rain." Tracks that employ straightforward percussion patterns give way to unstructured, but beautiful soundscapes, akin to Ben Frost but without the dread. Haunting vocal samples are layered over interesting synth patterns, oddly juxtaposed horns, and ambient-influenced tangents, sometimes mid-track.

Allien's singing and speaking neither punctures nor diffuses into these environs. Instead, it exists apart from the songs themselves, such as cabaret crooners command the attention of the room in spite of accompanying dancers and musicians. In this way, the synth-pop aspect of "You" and the tropical, sultry atmosphere of "Huibuh" are never boring, even if you find yourself skipping over them for the droning, yet urgent rhythm of "Schlumi." What is clear, whichever tracks become your favorites, is that Allien is writing songs and not 12-inches, complete works rather than flashes in a pan. She is admirable as an artist that seeks to push an envelope she has already destroyed.

Her use of sonic fragments throughout Dust fosters a sense of connectivity between what might be called a collection of disparate musical experiments. The fragments appear and fade, either as voices or instruments, and may remind older listeners of Scanner or even David Holmes. Perhaps this is Ellen Allien's sonic metaphor for dust, particularly the sort stirred by action into the air, permeating everything that shares its physical space. The album's press release, however, offers an alternative, cyclical perspective:

"You’ve reached the end of the night and, yet again, you can hardly believe everything you’ve been through. What now? You’d better dust yourself off. It’s time to start all over again."

The release date for Ellen Allien's new album, Dust, is May 17, 2010.

Check out a medley of the album's tracks.

TRACKLISTING:

1. Our Utopie

2. Flashy Flashy

3. My Tree

4. Sun The Rain

5. Should We Go Home

6. Ever

7. You

8. Dream

9. Huibuh

10. Schlumi