Pitchfork

Ellen Allien has long been branded a minimal techno artist without actually being one in any strict sense. Part of this branding is associative: Her flagship album was named Berlinette, and Allien has flirted aggressively with Berlin minimalism, imbuing all of her projects with dark, skeletal cores. On Thrills, this core was offset by trip-hop tropes; on Apparat collaboration Orchestra of Bubbles, by techno-pop opulence. But on Sool, Allien has caught up with her reputation. It is all core: uncompromising, barren, and austere.

Orchestra of Bubbles was the rare Allien project with advertised collaborators. Often, she's had more discreet partners-- SmashTV on Berlinette, for instance-- and on Sool, Berlin's AGF helps out on production. Whether this darker turn for Allien owes to AGF's influence is anybody's guess, and quickly ceases to matter after you sink below Sool's deceptively shallow surface, into its inestimable depths. Listeners who've enjoyed the radiant humanity with which Allien has often graced her tracks might be daunted, as Sool is a defiantly post-human record. Voices, when they appear, are garbled crowd chatter ("Einsteigen"), the Field-style slivers ("Bim"), or alien languages that only Maja Ratkje could translate ("Elphine"). On "Caress" and "Out", Allien works over the titular words until they shed their meaning and become another moving part in a complex contraption. The sole exception is "Frieda", a melting electro-pop ballad with airy, intelligible vocals that offers a brief respite from the album's brutal opacity.

At its smallest and most obscure, Sool suggests a world in which the last sentience has expired, but machines run on, humming and cooling in a depopulated landscape. Muted, rococo bass lines and echoing percussive flecks rub against each other with robotic persistence, and like the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest, we picture a drum machine percolating the air in an empty room. This is the first impression Sool conveys, but repeated listens reveal a humanity clandestinely working beneath its rhythmic clockwork. On the surface of "Sprung", we move by echolocation through its darkness before locating the elaborate, synthetic hand percussion. Most of Sool operates this way: The dominant mood is stern and deadening; the recessive one is playful and alive.

Allien's beats may be matte-finish, but they contain loads of subtle grayscale contrast offset by embellishments of startling brilliancy. Textural snippets glance off of each other with sandpapery friction, or cascade over the compositions like fiber-optic shimmers. This is especially pronounced on the aptly-titled "Caress": Amid a heavenly drone and thumping percussive triplets, a ping-ponging sub-rhythm and muffled rolls seem to build a static charge, raising the hairs on the back of your neck. It's these deep contrasts between dull and bright elements, or near-sounding and distant-sounding ones, that lend the album its odd sense of space. For microbeat-based music, it feels surprisingly ample. On "MM", for example, the rhythm ticks concisely, like a marble bouncing on tile, while the bass fans out overhead, leaving a great chasm between them. Still, as minimalist manifestos go, Sool is strident, and some listeners might wish Allien hadn't done such a good job of it-- it asks for a lot, and metes out its rewards slowly. But I find it to be a profoundly articulate conceptual space, both rudimentary and complex, composed of more nothing than something. That "nothing" can be disorienting to wade through, and we're lucky to have Allien, one of techno's most confident producers, as our guide.