Ellen Allien - "Thrills"

i find this album to be very easy to engage with, it is almost like a blank slate. i also find it to be less cold than either of her previous albums. that's probably the arp talking. the tracks sound like they are 120bpm, but they all hover around 128. i wish the tracks were slower actually, but then it might not sound so techno. i think it has a very late night humid vibe to it.

one was a quick 20 minute blast at Nitsa (check the Sonar thread) the other (on her site) was a portion of her main floor show, and unusually subdued and minimal-tech-dubby (up to that point, it may have got more interesting later on?).

I've heard better/more exciting sets from her to be honest.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/urban/oneworld/professor_ellen.shtml

Guess I'll have to search that one out on 5l5k sometime :(

Jeez. There are bigger things to get annoyed by in life I know but ffs.

creamfields, andaulcia.

I think she's a fantastic, radical DJ!

'Down' remixes by dinky, fuckaloop & drama society out sometime. Looking forward to the Dinky particularly.

Nice write up here for this mix - A set that Ellen Allien recorded as a Sónar promo, originally hosted by Samurai FM, is now streaming from the "Online Radio" section of Allien's own website. Like everything Allien does, it's wet and dry, brainy and ravey, shocking and blasé all at once. I didn't know half the tracks-- like the crickets-in-rocking-chairs opener, or the plaintive yet blissed out Basic Channelly number that follows it-- but a helpful ILMer posted the tracklist here, so we can all trainspot together as Allien veers from planar click tracks into ridiculous kazoo fantasias, and from massive overdriven hangar bangers into the epic, John-Williams-goes-raving conclusion of Paul Kalkbrenner's newest "Ta-tü-tata", a record which-- like Sascha Funke's "Boy", also a recent Bpitch release-- everyone should own.

Funny how it never really clicked with me completely before now (found that whilst already listening and googling, like most pieces of "news" on Pitchfork I completely miss them at the time 'cos the layout is so crapshite) I love how it's so airy yet claustrophobic. I just wish I could squeeze it all down into 45 mins, it's a bit slow to unfold (and the mixing on the last three tracks is erm.. not the best, esp. for her).

!!

=)

I'm still excited about the interview where she mentioned ideas for her Fourth album! (i.e. not this one).

Either way a semi-quiet stopgap 2006 could be good... I feel like I might burn out on Bpitch before I burn out on Ms. Allien though (and perhaps current dance stuff generally, maybe it's winter blues or I've just been following stuff, in my way, to the exclusion of too much other music... either way I've been a little less enthused of late).

She calls it their "first proper collaboration" anyhow, can't see any reason why she'd be obtuse about it. Holger Zilske has been credited with co-production on all three albums so far, I think he deserves more of the credit myself, for the sake of accuracy.

(omg bootleg with kate bush's 'mrs bartolozzi' is dying to be made)

Just like Berlinette* wasn't boring & straight enough for the techno purists, but way too danceable for the IDM geeks. I think she's better than many artists in both areas at the moment.

It's all near-perfect for me though =)

I just find this rather slow, steady uptake in general (and Bpitch too, if the boat hasn't been missed completely now) frustrating. But then I'm a total fanboy and probably have all this totally out of perspective.

Susan, I'm not even sure if 'electronica/dance/techno' is 'huge' in Europe by the standards of previous years. It's also hard to gauge living in England (not London for me), it feels like a really backwards country a lot of the time now since the Britpop years. Not that d/t/e automatically automatically = forwards thinking, but dance music doesn't seem to be viewed as a creative sector here unlike er... The Libertines?? Oh, and Grime.