Released on her own label, the increasingly high-profile
Bpitch Control,
Ellen Allien's second full-length album is more than just an abandoned fairground of Teutonic rhythms, elastic snares, icy synths, and digital sculpture. Demonstrating her mastery of subtle twitch and unconventional nuance,
Allien differentiates herself from the rest of the crystalline
microhouse mob with playful, humanist touches and on-a-dime midsong reappraisals. Lead track
"Alles Sehen" begins with a throbbing
electro beat and a gush of warm
house swirls before folding into a twinkling
vocal pop coda worthy of
Lali Puna;
"Push" shifts without notice from a grubby, scampering rhythm to a throbbing
industrial lockstep; and
"Augenblick" wrings form out of a ball of crinkled textures, machine-spat beats, and tremulous
Factory Records guitars. But it's the conceptual overlap and idea overflow of the bittersweet
"Wish" that resonate strongest -- over a mournful synth line, a quadruple-timed beatbox, and heavily processed acoustic guitar chugs,
Allien daydreams herself out of postwar Berlin: "Need a planet without cars and wars...I wish it could be true." Bitingly fierce, technologically adroit, and curiously poppy,
Berlinette marks yet another high point in an already superb year for Germanic
techno. ~ Mark Pytlik
