Apparat Orchestra Of Bubbles Views

General Goods

Experimental post-electro (aka IDM) tends to be an earthly affair, scuffing its rhythmic feet down a lane littered with gravelly transients; techno and trance more often than not are aerial feats, arcing sky-high. Orchestra of Bubbles manages to capture both trajectories at once. Like some crazy amusement park ride, you feel yourself ascending and descending at the same time; it's a simultaneous come-up and come-down, a combo rocket takeoff and marshmallow-factory landing. Which is to say, this isn't merely an impressive record: It's a remarkable feat of engineering.

Orchestra of Bubbles, an appropriately synaesthetic title if ever there were one, is an immersive record, from the rush and whir that open Turbo Dreams , the album's lead cut (and single), to the whitecapped guitar chords and percolating delay that end the closing Bubbles . Both artists have upped their stylistic range here: Bubbles borrows the Orb's ambient dub and Barbara Morgenstern's singer-songwriting, with a damn-near emo touch; Retina , a crazy carousel of sawing cellos and bright, arpeggiated keyboards, sounds a lot like Steve Reich. (And maybe a little like Dead Can Dance-- but then, Bpitch always did have a bit of a hidden goth sensibility.) Metric , meanwhile, traces dubstep's infiltration of Berlin; the strings-- real ones!-- might not be orthodox over at Tempa HQ, but there's no mistaking that seismic wobble.

You'll tire of this easily, warned a long-time Ellen Allien fan, crushing my growing obsession with Orchestra of Bubbles. Released Allien's Berlin-based label, Bpitch Control, the album was written with her ex-boyfriend, Apparat (nMeacute;e Sascha Ring), another German deejay who co-owns the Shitkatapult label with T. Raumschmiere. What immediately stands out is the repetitive rhythm of the rosin-heavy bow digging into the cello strings on Retina, a song that has absolutely no dance-floor potential or particularly epic climax at its end. It is, however, one of the album's most mesmerizing tracks, getting deep under my skin in a way without boiling over like the volatile Under does. The latter is something you'd hear at a club night's apex, when the floor begins to stick from the sweat and evaporation of spilled alcohol. A close kin to Retina is Metric, whose lush strings are faster in pace and allow ample breathing room for anyone willing to undertake the challenge of a remix.

The record's single, Way Out, is a great example of how Allien and Apparat perform a system of checks and balances with this project. Allien uses the dance floor as a blank canvas, painting patterns and rhythms that stray far from generic house but never wander too deep into IDM's obtuse fields. Much like her previous album, Thrills, where she explored a more approachable techno-glitch angle with singles Magma, Your Body Is My Body and the kinetic Down, much of Orchestra Of Bubbles grabs the wheel and makes a ninety-degree turn with the likes of the anthemic muffle of Jet and the AFX-like chop 'n' screw of Do Not Break. Apparat's helping hand is apparent in Floating Points, where an influence of formulaic composition is spread thick across the underlying rhythm. Whereas Allien can be so experimental in the sculpting of her songs, Apparat lends regimentation to the composition of some of the slower tracks. Because of that, the album's softer points are never dull.