Ellen Allien

Dust Ellen Allien

Ellen Allien, owner of the BPitch Control label and Fairy Queen of Berlin's more delicately woven rave music, has been tinkering with the sound of the city for over a decade now. What has remained from all these years – packed with great releases, highly original remixes and exploratory mix CDs – are her five monolithic albums, each the condensed result of a completely different creative phase – made to stand the test of time. Indeed, looking back, each of them in its own right can be seen as marking a piece of techno history. You just have to think back to the feeling of astonishment upon hearing Stadtkind for the first time. Or being spellbound by Berlinette. Or being pulverised by the ARP in Thrills. And let's not forget the superb collaboration with Apparat which resulted in Orchestra of Bubbles, perhaps the most beautiful indietronic gem to be produced in recent years. Now it already seems an eternity since Ellen Allien last remodelled her own sound with the sharp-edged diamond Sool in 2008 – a release which opened the gates to a far-off parallel world where minimalist artefacts float through the room with a cool elegance and distanced allure. Yet, just like each of Ellen's previous albums, this was followed by a cut. A metamorphosis. A reincarnation. With her new album, Dust, Ellen removes the sense of remoteness entirely. A warm immediacy takes centre stage in place of distanced artistic abstraction. As such, what is perhaps Ellen's most personal album takes the form of a complete spectrum of her creative output to date, a cross-section in time which also looks ahead to previously untrodden paths... The world according to Ellen.