Ellen Allien - Sool

Interrupting a sequence of albums that were going further into the direction of pop music, Berlin's techno darling Ellen Allien now moves the opposite way and, with the help of AGF on production, makes her most austere and minimal record to date. With only very few sparse sounds, most of them featuring a very dark and industrial resonance, "Sool" still manages to capture our attention by incorporating micro-sounds that seem like cirurgical frequency accidents made by machines in an otherwise cold, metallic and post-human atmosphere. In an album where the elements used are reduced to the only absolutely necessary, the sounds that aren't heard are almost as important as what is played. And this is the secret for its hypnotic and alienating properties, ones that manage to suggest and evoke a parallell universe of sensations, out of so little. Here's the magic of it. (7/10)

MySpace page
Official site