Send "Ellen Allien " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Ellen Allien is a pillar of the Berlin electronic music scene. Since she dropped her Boogybytes mix and Sool in 2008, however, she's acted more as a scene curator than an artist, counting just a remix and a single as official releases and instead focusing her energy on BPitch Control's expanding roster and her own fashion label. Watergate 05, a mix for Berlin's famed Watergate club (where Allien holds a DJ residency), not only marks Allien's first full-length release since 2008, it is her latest contribution to a high-profile mix series, following both BPitch's own Boogybytes and her 2007 mix for London's Fabric club.Watergate 05 is the second mix Allien has provided from Watergate-- her 2009 podcast for Resident Advisor was recorded live at the club. Working there seems to have loosened up Allien a bit, as both Watergate and her RA mix are friendlier and jammier than previous deck work. Where Boogybytes felt tightly wound, Watergate is almost schizophrenic, featuring work from looser producers like Matias Aguayo, Luciano, and Röyksopp. Here Allien allows her selections to develop-- Watergate offers just 16 tracks during its hour runtime. This leads to few mixing revelations, placing the focus squarely on Allien's choices. After a ho-hum opening featuring some meticulous but boilerplate techno from John Tejada and DJ Yellow, Niconé & Sascha Breamer's "Nur Ma Kurz (Philip Bader Remix)" sets the tone: humid, busy percussion set against earworm vocal samples. It's something Allien returns to with Aguayo's vocal mix of "Bo Jack", Allien's own remix of Uffie's "Pop the Glock", and AGF/Delay's outstanding Connection ("Heartthrob Remix)". Finishing the set with Brigitte Fontaine & Khan's "Fine Mouche (Original Tango Paris Version)", a wry French piano ballad, is a welcome concession, as it's probably not the type of track you can close a proper live set with....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| The trouble with taking risks is that sometimes they don't pay off. Take the mix CD format: The stigma attached to software-assisted mixes has gradually receded over the last ten years, but—putting aside the DE:9-style molecular mixing approach—manual craft is still justly held in greater esteem, thus making failure its direct inversion. Having previously released five commercially available mixes, BPitch boss Ellen Allien is well versed in committing herself to disc. As her "vinyl mix made after a party at my flat in Berlin" for fabric, and live set recorded at Watergate for RA's podcast series suggests, Allien's not averse to the thrills and spills that can happen when you simply press record. Unfortunately on Watergate 05, it appears that particular dice has been rolled one too many times. While you'd hardly place Allien among the smooth school of selectors, a few coarse contours is never a bad thing; but the issue with Watergate 05 is that she essentially ties one hand behind her back by consistently pairing incompatible tracks. As early as the first transition—the neo trance patter of DJ Yellow's "Lost" into John Tejada's somewhat dated sounding "The End of It All"—the flow is impeded by an unsavoury key-clash. The sense of malaise is further fuelled as next cut, Lump's "Music Lover," rather crudely kills any suggestion of an initial vibe with its vociferous LFO wobble. Being lined-up on completely the wrong bar during its ascent does little to help its cause. Neither does following it up with Luciano's "Celestial"—undoubtedly the most irksome offering on his Tribute To The Sun LP....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| The surface-level irony of dance music is that, for music so overtly aligned with bodily pleasure, it can be really monotonous. Learning to listen to dance music for people who aren’t sure they know how to enjoy it involves, more than anything else, learning to listen to duration — an interplay between elements that is less scripted dialogue than carefully sculpted cut-up. The literary theory term polyphony might be useful here: even though most music consists of many voices (however that word may be defined), most popular music has some sort of graspable narrative, whether delivered through lyrics or melody. Dance music is polyphonic in the sense that the story the music is telling gets told by the way voices interpenetrate as much as by what the voices are actually saying. This is especially true of mixes, which occupy an in-between space in dance music. They act as promotional tools for clubs, the capstone of a DJ’s residency, a showcase of the mixer’s skills, and a chance to debut new material, yet they’re made for home listening. It’s a hard gap to bridge, and it’s not surprising that the mixes that get the most attention are often ones consisting all-original productions, like Omar-S’ or Ricardo Villalobos’ entries in the Fabric series. Ellen Allien is prolific even by dance music standards. She has broad enough appeal to even have a pretty robust Allmusic entry. Her last album, SOOL, came out in 2008 and was a collaboration with AGF, who contributed microsonics and avant-garde whimsy to Allien’s more outgoing production style. Her creative energies are dispersed enough to allow her the freedom of working within the album-length mix format without anxiety, and this is what she does on Watergate 05, her contribution to the eponymous Berlin club’s series. Some mixes make overtures to a non-dance audience, like Ivan Smagghe’s Live at Robert Johnson while others sport a distinct authorial stamp, like Ada’s remix roundup Adaptations. Watergate 05 has elements of both, and is likewise more memorable than the former and less memorable than the latter....full text |
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