Ellen Allien & Apparat's "Orchestra of Bubbles" — What Say ILM?

i'd rate it pretty equally with thrills, definitely prefer it to berlinette though. ellen is, i think, on an upward curve.

also, almost all of my real-life crew rate this as no 1 of the year or close.

The old (long) thread had lots of writing about this, but appears very lost/de-indexed by the ilm downtime :'(

I am looking though (and can't believe I didn't bookmark it!). Now that we NEED the database search, lol.

That and Berlinette perhaps two of the very last glitch-heavy electronic records that really engaged me at all. Except for Ryoji Ikeda - Dataplex... perhaps I just stopped paying close attention as Berlinette blew me away so completely.

Take Lex's "indietronica" talk with a LARGE pinch of salt re: Berlinette! It's mostly very, very danceable indeed.

Ellen Allien & Apparat "Orchestra of Bubbles"

see also TS: Ellen Allien's Orchestra of Bubbles vs. Kelley Polar's Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens

I definitely found Berlinette largely danceable as well, but agree also with Lex that Thrills is more of a classic grinding techno kind of danceable.

his live sets are also fantastic.

ooh!

haha i heard recently that tel aviv was a great place to go for clubbing.

xpost. There is so much electronic music as good or better than this album and the Burial one (the latter being the most overrated album of the year, though still very enjoyable).

So OTM.

Still, this album is not to be discounted. It's very good.

I feel like both artists (esp. Ellen) were taking everything down a notch or two so that they could find common ground. But what they finally did worked beautifully on its own terms.

Apparat is the one dude. He's a bit too IDM for me. Some nice stuff but a bit dry.

-- jimn

His "Can't Computerize It" ep on Bpitch is pretty dope for someone apparently not interested in making "dance music" anymore!

What I've heard of Silizium (lead track in full, and sampled the rest) actually felt slightly inferior to the vocal stuff off Duplex to me... and the ShapesMode(?) ep (Neo Ouija) contents I'm not sure about.

I'd hardly say she's "taking 2007 off"...aside from the inevitable 12" releases she's got three mixes coming out (Fabric, Boogybytes, and The Other Side of Berlin, where hopefully the DVD side will be as good as Black Strobe's and not halfassed like Damian Lazarus').

Three(!) mixes is certainly keeping busy though. I just hope there isn't a drop off in quality to accompany this world domination plan :/

You know, you could have just asked.

and back to the topic, Apparat must be seen live to be understood. but even the first time i saw him i didn't 'get it.' this last time though, in september, WOW. he dropped some warm track at the start with these breathy female vocals that was like not much i've heard.

I bet an EA+Apparat live PA would be fun and cute

The one thing I'd say about this record in a negative sense is that as easy as it is to listen to and absorb, I feel like I can only derive so much enjoyment from music whose main pleasures are creative variations in texture and rhythm. Don't get me wrong: regardless of whether it's Ellen or Apparat who's the real "genius" here, there's no question this record is some kind of programming and arranging achievement; few records have caught my ear the way Orchestra of Bubbles has. But the experience is also sort of like eating a candy bar for lunch.

Asked you to shoplift it for me? Okay, I'll do that next time.

You don't find "Edison" somewhat wistful & nostalgic? "Jet" even a little euphoric? "Rotary" and "Retina" to have a sense of dramatic urgency to them? There's tension, release, melancholy and more all over it for me... :/

Even there, tho, I find some of her gestures just a bit...obvious. Again, it might have something to do with how advanced the arrangements are. It's almost as if her aesthetic and sense of composition haven't quite caught up with them...

Rotary certainly has a great urgency to it. that actually might be my favorite track on the album.

mostly stuff already posted in the (now useless) sandbox thread, but there is a tracklist for that "Other Side Of Berlin" mix (on Resident Advisor as well, I'm slipping lol) which I thought looked pretty sketchy on first glance, but being rather familar with the first and last third already (can sort of piece it together in my head) it could actually be pretty good!

and the next BoogyBytes isn't due till the Autumn it seems.

i'm not sure what you mean by this. "aesthetic" - it seems to me that there's a very, very clearly defined and coherent aesthetic which ellen & apparat aim for on OOB, which is why it works so well as an album - the way the melodies seem very organic, the light-headed textures and so on. "sense of composition" - well as dance tracks they all seem pretty damn perfect! ellen's sense of how to make a track peak is impeccable i think. unless you mean her sense of composition in terms of pop songs, which would be fairly silly as - 'way out' apart - this isn't an album of pop songs.

My feeling is that the reason melodies usually seem very organic in records like these is because they're not really melodies in the same way we think of in other pop music — ie, yes, they're linear and monophonic but they tend to serve the music as opposed to the other way around. Often, even when there's vocals, they're really deployed as another texture, to create a mood or evoke some kind of feeling (see: AFX, BoC). They're fragments.

Obv. all this goes way beyond Orchestra of Bubbles. But as noted upthread, the tension inherent to even the best of these records is almost entirely of the textural and rhythmic variety — not anything to do with melody or harmony, really. I guess the question that gnaws at me, even when you look across the history of dance music, is: why can't you do both? Or perhaps, why aren't more people doing both?

I mean, you have to acknowledge that spatial, electronic arrangements create a kind of energy in music that's unique. And there's something to be said for using the spare parts of pop music for other purposes. But a lot of IDM, microhouse, etc. artists seem like they would be more exciting (and transcend the pure dance-related scenes from whence they came) if they were a touch more rigorous in determining why their music is so impressionistic and non-linear. After all, you can't really dance to a lot of this stuff anyway...

Let's put it this way: if this record were "dance music" in the way that straight up techno or house is dance music, I wouldn't have started this thread in the first place. I think it's a little more than that — what exactly that is is what I'm trying to figure out.

Is it a little "more than that" in the way a lot of commerically successful mid '90s dahnce albums tended to be? Or for that matter, Basement Jaxx, Mylo, Royksopp...

If we're still on the subject of Orchestra of Bubbles, having seen EA&A live twice last year, I can testify that you can dance to pretty much all of it...

I think it's a little more than that — what exactly that is is what I'm trying to figure out.

a rare example of an electronic producer doing something slightly more suited to home listening than their 12s for the full-length, but never losing the dancefloor imperative and never disappearing into boring indietronica. it's an album which sounds equally good in a club, coming down at 7am after the club, or as the soundtrack to a quiet night in, or...any time really.

Well, to be fair, I didn't say you couldn't dance to ...Bubbles — I said you couldn't dance to a lot of microhouse and IDM-ish music (of course, you can dance to a washing machine if you want...).

never disappearing into boring indietronica

I would concur, as I've listened to this a lot of late.

slightly more suited to home listening

True. Hmmm...

(c/o: http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.asp?ID=8452)