AGF
Einzelkämpfer
AGFPRO011
AGF Producktion 2009
13 Tracks. 60mins09secs

Amazon UK: DLD Amazon US: CD | DLD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

Poet, musician and sound artist, Antie ‘AGF’ Greie-Fuchs has been distilling her particular blend of electronic music for over fifteen years. Born in what was then East Germany, Greie relocated to Berlin in the mid-nineties, where she met Jürgen Kühn and formed Laub. The pair released their first album in 1997 on Kitty-Yo and went on to release four more, the latest one published two years ago on Greie’s AGF Producktion. Beside the many projects that have kept her busy over the years (The Dolls, The Lappetites or her collaboration with long term partner Vladislav Delay as AGF/Delay), she established herself as a solo artist as early as 2001 with the split release Constant Variable with Kyborg, for which she contributed three tracks and, a year later, her solo debut, Head Slash Bauch.

Her latest effort, Einzelkämpfer, which translates as Lone Warrior, is said to explore the idea of lone warriors through the ages and across species. Pushing the concept to the extreme, Einzelkämpfer is released through Greie’s own AGF Producktion imprint. She is also keen to point out that, while some of her recent releases had a certain rhythmic structure or focus, the beats have largely been disposed off here as Greie moulds the fractured electronic textures for which she is well known into abstract ambient forms. While her last solo record, Words Are Missing, was, as its title suggested, devoid entirely of words or phrases, her vocals chopped up into minute particles which were then used as simple sonic components within the music, she returns here to slightly more conventional lyrical forms. There are bribes of stories found scattered throughout this album, yet, the voice, as is the case on pretty much all AGF releases, is often distorted and twisted beyond recognition, making any attempt at following any coherent thread on any particular track virtually impossible.

Very much like the music, voice and words are integrant part of the fabric of Greie’s song, but also contribute greatly to influence the mood of a particular piece in ways that only the human voice can. This is particularly the case on the title track, with its fragments of melody slashed through by deep sonic undercurrents, or later on Alone In The Woods (The Fox, The Skunk And The Rabbit) or Kopffüsser (Cephalopod). But it is the extremely detailed soundscapes and extensive use of textures that totally captivates. Greie has increasingly refined her template over the years, and here, each song seems like a miniature world where sound and grain constantly collide, often changing appearance within a few seconds, each distinctive part baring little connection to the one that preceded it or to the one that follows it, as is the case on Her Beauty Kills Me, Worin Mein Mund Zur Bewegung Fand or Practicing Beat Anarchy. Occasionally, the palette of a composition is narrower, giving for a moment a sense of calm to an otherwise extremely complex and demanding record.

Einzelkämpfer, Antie Greie’s sixth solo record, and her first since moving to Finland, can be a challenging piece of work, but the impressive treatment that she applies here give this album a particular edge. Perhaps not as original and haunting as Words Are Missing, and let down by a somewhat diluted concept, Einzelkämpfer is nevertheless a very successful affair and an impressive addition to an already rich body of work.

4.4/5

Antye Greie | AGF Producktion
Amazon UK: DLD Amazon US: CD | DLD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

AGF/DELAY
Symptoms
BPC193
BPicth Control 2009
12 Tracks. 56mins14secs

Buy/Stream: CD | MP3 | iTunes | Spotify

Four years on from their previous outing as an creative couple, Antye ‘AGF’ Greie and her life companion Sasu ‘Vadislav Delay’ Ripatti rekindled their collaborative project and serve another slice of angular space-age pop, where clean cut electronics and dub-infused moods form a warm and vibrant cocoon for AGF’s ice-cool breathy vocals and miniature tales of every day life.

The pair’s first collaborations were documented on Explode, an album released on AGF’s own imprint, and was rapidly followed with a second collaboration, this time between the pair and composer Craig Armstrong, as The Dolls. Since, both have been busy on various solo projects and productions jobs. Symptoms returns to the original AGF/Delay template and give it a new definition. The album kicks off with Get Lost, which originally sounds very close to the mood of Ripatti’s superb Luomo album of last year, but as soon as Greie’s voice pierce through the silky flow of electronics, the mood becomes more enigmatic, and as the melody settles and its hooks become anchored in the brain, hypnotic. This is repeated even more successfully on the next track, Connection, and, later on, on Most Beautiful or the closing In Cycles.

Throughout, Delay provides startlingly dense soundscapes and sharp beats, which, while occasionally close to the disco-tech of his most recent Luomo incarnation, show more restraint and remain, for the most part, set to relatively low tempo. This gives AGF’s voice all the space she requires to outline her pop vignettes, even when her voice is subjected to effects and distortions. When the pace picks up, it rarely does so in any straightforward fashion. Ripatti may occasionally rely on pounding grooves in his own work, but here, beside Downtown Snow and Outbreak, which both bend under the heavy patter of electro funk, Greie is left fighting against abstract rhythms (Generic, Symptoms), or odd time signatures (Congo Hearts, Smileaway). This gives the album a slightly oppressive mood and makes it quite a demanding record.

It takes a while to appreciate the depth and span of Symptoms, repeat listens often reveal new angles and twists. It now seems as if the first AGF/Delay album was just a scrapbook of ideas which, once fully develop, would take on a much more accomplished form. ‘Pop music, so sick, gives us the creeps’ throws AGF on Downtown Snow. If only pop music was giving us the creeps like it does here…

4.5/5

AGF/Delay | BPitch Control
Buy/Stream: CD | MP3 | iTunes | Spotify

ELLEN ALLIEN
Sool
BPC 175
BPitch Control 2008
11 Tracks. 52mins54secs

Given Ellen Allien’s close links with the Berlin techno scene, this album is probably going to come as a surprise to many. While it does not abandon the dancefloor aesthetic of earlier records, the beat count has certainly slowed and a more inward-looking sound has superseded the skeletal techno of old. Whether the helping hand in the studio of fellow Berliner AGF has contributed to this more reflective sound is not easy to say, but the cut-up, Schaefferesque sound experiments of AGF’s Words Are Missing do definitely seep through into the mix from time to time on Sool. Perhaps this change of direction is a sign that Allien is moving away from the modern minimalist scene she has done so much to shape. But if not, it does at least suggest her sound is drawing on new sources. And after the largely disappointing Boogybytes techno compilation she DJed earlier this year, this would be no bad thing.

Of course, Allien has not abandoned her roots altogether. The beat is still there, but she seems more interested this time in exploring the empty spaces around it. As well as AGF’s chopped-up vocal twists, the record is swathed in robotic glitches and dark, synthesised atmospherics. And often the essence of a track is to be found lurking beneath the bass and beat template, where creeping melodies stir. The slow-burning Caress follows in this vein, unveiling itself piece by piece as the mechanics of the track slowly intertwine. Elsewhere, drums and bass are put to more playful effect on Bim and Sprung, where AGF’s fingerprints are more evident. Simple melodies are slowly enveloped in glitchy electronics while the framework of a beat gradually unwinds.

If at times the overall aesthetic of the record is a little unforgiving, we could blame this on the minimalist principles that are supposed to underlay it. But it is not so much minimalism that lies at the heart of things here as a denser, more studied take on techno itself. Sool only seems like a minimalist record in the sense that the palate she uses is restricted to what fits in with the overall vision. But where too much minimalism ends up sounding bland and repetitious when following this model, the material here is complex enough to overcome such a problem. And, at times, she broadens the sound of the album entirely – with a breathless Enoesque ballad on Frieda and a warped, extended oboe solo on Zauber.

There is still room for more straightforward dancefloor techno, as on Its and Ondu, but these are where the album is at its least interesting. Instead, it is the interconnecting lines between AGF’s dark, isolationist electronica and the more conventional beatscapes of Allien’s sound that bring the richest rewards. Where this fusion goes from here is anybody’s guess, but Sool offers some intriguing photographic negatives of today’s techno scene.

3.7/5

Ellen Allien | BPitch Control
Buy: CD | iTunes

]]> http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/st/2008/06/ellen-allien-sool-bpitch-control/feed/ 0 http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/st/2008/04/agf-words-are-missing/ http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/st/2008/04/agf-words-are-missing/#comments Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:55:04 +0000 Robert Rowlands http://www.themilkfactory.co.uk/st/2008/04/agf-words-are-missing/

AGF
Words Are Missing
AGFPRO008
AGF Producktion 2008
55mins59secs

As Homer once said, there is a time for words and there is a time for sleep. Whatever her instincts as a poet, Laub founder Antye Greie has obviously decided to tear up the script here and abandon words altogether. Boldly claiming to look into “the phenomena of silence, speechlessness, deconstructed language and impeded communication”, at first glance this is a record that seems more like an academic treatise than a piece of music. And the ethereal, glitchy sonic landscapes at first seem almost too cerebral – as if an idea had been placed wholesale onto disc with no musical intervention in between.

But like a dusty text that gains in clarity the more one looks at it, sounds open up here as though from cracks in the carefully prepared edifices. It is fair to say that AGF is hardly doing anything new in attempting to break away from the poetic template. Even before T.S. Eliot, poets were probing into the fringes of language and meaning, so perhaps the garlands for forging new poetic realms will have to wait for now. Yet as music there is much of interest here. Patterns of sound are torn apart and spliced together again, creating jagged new rhythms that collapse on top of one another. The landscape she treads across in her search for material may be spartan, but when she gets the mixture right, the results are strikingly potent. Tracks like the astonishing Letters Make No Meaning see cut-up words stutter and skip over empty sonic universes. Percussion clatters, forlorn, bellowing bass notes sound from afar, giving us something both urgent and utterly lost. In fact she at times does to words what Oval routinely do to CDs – unearthing in half-familiar sounds fresh and unsettling discoveries. Others, like opener Words Are Useless and Food Combination Chart, move the sound on to create more delicate terrains – although the sense of desolation always seems to linger. And, amid the earnestness, there is even sometimes a sense of fun, as on closing number Under Water (Run!), where a rare groove flickers beneath layers of mad, shrill fluting.

At times, the ceaselessly rearranged material descends a little too far into a sort of cut and paste version of musique concrete. This happens on Die Ufer Sind In Feindes Hand in particular, where the applause of an audience is looped around a barking vocal and grinding electronic dirge. The inspiration may be Pierre Schaeffer, but the end product seems a little forced. The over-arching idea here probably stretches too far to work without occasionally over-reaching itself, but what AGF offers is so fresh and unremittingly different from most of what fills the shelves of record shops nowadays, it has to be given praise.

3.8/5

AGF | AGF Produktion
Buy: CD | iTunes

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Boogybytes Vol. 4 mixed by Ellen Allien
BPC171
BPitch Control 2008
15 Tracks. 66mins00secs

After the success of her recent Fabric mix, Berlin DJ Ellen Allien here takes over the controls on the Boogybytes series to deliver a tightly scripted disquisition on the micro-techno scene. With most DJ sets, there is a need to balance coherence with variety, and the new with the pleasingly familiar. Here, though, Allien aims for a sound whose consistency of beat and texture varies in slight details from one track to the next. It is a bit like listening to the slow and delicate shifting of tectonic plates – with the calamitous possibility of the quake lingering somewhere in the distance.

Because of the clinical, almost surgical cleanliness of Allien’s style, calamity and event are rarely brought into the mix in any obvious way. Instead, melodies float beneath scattergrams of sonic pulses, allowing rhythm to dictate the album’s intricate soundwaves. The sound that results is effortlessly now – as BPitch, her label, proudly avers – a soundtrack of urban facades and cityscapes. It’s the kind of music 3am DJs are playing in the underground radio of their dreams. But it is hard not to feel at times that, despite the rigour and economy of the mix, somewhere along the line the emotion has gone missing. Tracks like Vera’s In the Nook quiver with tension without ever really breaking into flight. Others, like Sozadams’ Eyes Forlon, offer dissonance and atmosphere, but the chemistry doesn’t quite seem to work. At times you are left wondering whether Allien is in danger of seeking tracks that fit the sound over tracks that actually work. Taken in isolation, it is easy to feel that some efforts here would plausibly go unnoticed.

The album does have its outright successes, such as the ethereal Nitzi (In My Mind, So Fine) by Melon, a track that in only four suppressed minutes of slow-burn intensity manages to allude to strains and ideas that somehow stay out of earshot. Its partner here, Fitzpatrick by Ricardo Villalobos and Patrick Ense, is another that masterfully intimates far more than it ever openly offers.

As the album draws to a close, the hard-edged dancefloor aesthetic of earlier tracks is superseded by the late-night taxi home listlessness of Sascha Funke’s Double Checked and the moody, bass-driven dirge of Kassem Mosse’s A1. And, with the beats down to zero, Allien pulls off her first real surprise of the album by ending her set with the intricate, piano-plodding beauty of Little Dragon’s Twice. It is a moment of unexpected openness that, for whatever reason, Allien too often elsewhere chooses to hold back.

3/5

Ellen Allien | Bpitch Control
Buy: CD