Send "Ellen Allien " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Following techno music is a little like following the stock market or playing fantasy baseball: There's a major emphasis on what or who's hot at any given moment. Fans sniff out gems, report on hot streaks, predict hot streaks. Just like anything based on speculating, things can change quickly; there are market forces at work. More so than most of her peers, Ellen Allien is in control of her own stock. She's a career artist-- in addition to her music, she runs Bpitch Control and a fashion label-- and her moves are large and purposeful. This has occasionally led to releases that felt calculated-- 2008's Sool was her "minimal" album-- but in sum have made Allien worth tracking through a career, not just through a particularly creative stretch. Dust, Allien's latest album, again redefines her, this time as a melancholy techno-pop songwriter with interests well outside her Berlin techno sphere.Dust mines similar territory as Allien's still seminal Berlinette, lacking that album's sturdy radiance but offering plenty of veteran risk-taking. There's steely electro, lilting synth-pop, and a calm salsa. One song sounds like the xx, another like Goldfrapp. During "Sun the Rain", the xx soundalike, Allien sings, "Some days life feels so easy," which is perfect: Allien's statuses as scene leader and lifetime artist seem assured, and Dust sounds like a fun, comfortable reflection of that....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| Ellen Allien is a brand that we have come to trust in a very specific way—her titanic BPitch Control records, her collabos with Apparat—each of her releases is a hallmark by which other comparable recordings are judged (and therefore hardly ever vice versa). So when she turns a corner, what do we say, exactly? On Dust, we find our berlinette greatly defrosted from the icy postapocalyptic machinations of Sool, exhibiting an emotional openness that recalls the warmer moments on Orchestra of Bubbles, albeit with much gentler pluck-n-click percussion work. This is a summer record. Tracks like "The Sun The Rain" and "My Tree" juxtapose a droning low end with a cheerful clean guitar. Allien's ethereally accented voice provides the usual ghost in the machine while sunny chord progressions via pad and hornsynths lift the tunes out of monotony. Highlight "You" plays almost like a formulaic rock track—a healthy fuzzy bassline, mashy strumming and a clockwork 4/4 structure lend it probably to stateside airplay. And with Fever Ray firmly in our minds, we know that weird distorted foreign girlvox isn't a straight turnoff. We even find chillwave dance making an appearance on "Ever." Crystalline melodies and a sleepily funky bass throb ensure this simple single is as head-clearing and addictive as huffing pure oxygen. "Huibuh," a dubby tropical track, finds the likeability sweetspot as Allien intones "What can we do?" over a simple earworming music box melody. It's the sort of a track you would want to magically drip out of the crackling tree-mounted speakers on some beachfront bar on Koh Phi Phi. (Or perhaps Bar 25.)...full text |
| Clashmusic |
| Berlin electronic figurehead Ellen Allien’s latest is a strong dance music album. It’s no 'Leftism', but there’s plenty of depth, adventurousness and personality to ensue it transcends the cobbled-together approach, that still to this day gets passed off by DJ/producers as an excuse for a longplayer. 'Dust' veers from the sparkling, melodic opener 'Ourutopie', to the flippant 'Flashy Flashy' with its Chloe-esque vocals, to the 90s-style abstract electronica of 'Should We Go Home' and 'Dream'. Allien also takes a leaf out of M83’s book, and braches out into dreamy shoegaze over several tracks, which work surprisingly well....full text |
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