KIKI
Kaiku
BPC196
BPitch Control 2009
11 Tracks. 63mins10secs

Buy: CD | iTunes

It’s been nearly five years since Kiki’s debut album, Run With Me, was issued on BPitch Control, and eight years since Berlin-based Finnish musician Joakim Ijäs first landed on the label, but while this may seem like a long time between releases, the man was far from idle in the interim, distilling EPs, remixes and the occasional MP3-only release with insistent regularity in the last four years.

Kaiku, Ijäs’s second album, marks a giant step forward from the pretty generic warehouse dance of Run With Me into much more subtle and elegant techno. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

MODERAT
Moderat
BPC200
BPitch Control 2009
11 Tracks. 48mins07secs

Buy: CD | CD+DVD

When two acts join forces on a common project, they have the option of doing so under a new name, risking in the process to go unnoticed, or merge their individual noms-de-scene in the way Berlin-based duo Modeselektor, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, and electronic wizard Sascha ‘Apparat’ Ring have done. The trio’s first collaboration goes back to 2002 with the Auf Kosten Der Gesundheit EP, released on Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control, but, due to other commitments, this never materialised into anything more until a chance encounter last year in a swimming pool in Berlin brought them back together and rekindled the collaboration

Recorded in Berlin’s famous Hansa Studios, using the venue’s vintage equipment, the album combines Modeselektor’s elegant and playful electronica and Apparat’s sleek textural moody pop to create a rather suave and warm hybrid where evocative instrumentals and angular vocal pieces coexists in perfect harmony. Continue Reading »

TELEFON TEL AVIV
Immolate Yourself
BPC188CD
BPitch Control 2008
10 Tracks. 46mins12secs

Joshua Eustis and Charlie Cooper have the tendency to create a nicely laid out little world for themselves with every new album, only to tear it to pieces and move the goal post in totally unexpected directions with the next.

Announced soberly on their myspace page last April in a post entitled ‘The new LP’, with the straight to the point comment ‘It’s finished’, Immolate Yourself is a strong departure from the chilled atmospheres of the pair’s somewhat disappointing second album, Maps Of What Is Effortless, released in 2004. Having first cast a gentle glow over dreamy electronica on their debut opus, Fahrenheit Fair Enough (2001), they retreated into less adventurous territories with their sophomore effort. Having delivered their former label, Chicago’s Hefty, one last shot with Remixes Compiled, collecting the pair’s reworkings of tracks by people as diverse as Nine Inch Nails, Apparat, American Analogue Set or Phil Ranelin, TTA have landed on Ellen Allien’s Berlin-based BPitch Control and adopted a resolutely more upfront and upbeat sound. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »