Ellen Allien: New Life – Album Review & Interview

Ellen Allien: New Life

(BPitch)

Out Now 

LP | DL

On New Life, the latest album from future-facing techno visionary Ellen Allien, the intense allure of nature dominates not in isolation, but as a vital component to the electric flash of community connectivity. These are anthems for autonomy in the age of anxious wreckage. Techno as protest for riot people. Interview and review by Ryan-Lewis Walker.

What does my body do?

In the interconnected overlays of stainless steel, walking below gatherings of lonesome cranes, the ruins of an ancient industry slowly decomposing or eaten entirely by the oncoming onslaught of skyward-shooting futurism – my body feels like Tetsuo’s demise in Akira. The body in a state of explosive mutation. A grotesque crescendo of wires and flesh, expanding and enmeshing on unparalleled scales of stimulation and energy unmoored by human inhibition. The city is an instrument by body plays. Sends signals to my agitated, autistic brain like strings only I can see and feel, strum and snap. Trains screech in the distance. People scream at themselves. It swallows, chews, and spits back out. It feels cold and hot at the same time—a stranger in a complex of thousands. A psychic lover lost in the physical throng of people, magnetically lulled and colliding in the towering hive, everyone digitally twisted into fixtures of sensory collapse. Daydreaming to their own privately serenaded cyber-lullabies.

My body behaves in a very different way when engulfed by nature. No less so than listening to Ellen Allien’s new record, New Life. Released on her own BPitch imprint, it is a record that implores for the collective unshackling of the leg irons as a means of making sure every molecular moment is treated with just as much significance as those that we consider to be of seismic proportions – a baby’s first steps, a white butterfly in the back garden, a bird that returns to the bench where an old man feeds it scraps of bread everyday, the best coffee ever, the best kiss ever.

But this isn’t to say that the music within is…soft, or soppy– far from it. Because that ”best thing ever” could be a rave of concrete-cleaving techno, delicately laced with sexy lacerations of searing-hot machines fit and fighting with filthy tongues. A pulsating thrust imbued with the radioactive hue, the ambient crackle and magisterial glitch and glisten of human touch. Is it soft to be sensitively tapped into the ethers? No.

Allien has made no bones about the fact that techno regularly operates as a dissenting presence oppositional to the daily, dogmatic opera that defined the opening paragraph. Techno as a catalyst to colour in the lines left empty by all that we find solace in the distractions of – another version of this watch, another variant of this aftershave, another update of this app, another download of this piece of gear. Techno as a way to unveil the guillotines behind every billboard. Techno as a way to transcend hardened shells and heavy piles of hard leaves; and discover the steps to anywhere we so desire to tread – a new life.

Yet, although most definitely a complete collection of songs, recorded in different countries, different seasons, the album isn’t ”done” yet. New Life will never be an entirely finished thing, because New Life encompasses so much, will continue to do so and always has done since the very beginnings of Allien’s career. We might be able to possess the tactile artefact, the solid, sonic log within which the New Life portal is opened up. But on a spiritually and creative level, the experiment of what New Life promises is an eternal, open ambition.

A resident DJ at Berlin’s Tresor and E-Werk club in the early 90s as one of the foundations of the Berlin techno scene, a face behind the bar, a presence behind the decks, the life and mind of the party and attended her first Love Parade boat in 1991 (to then play the iconic Siegesaule a few years later), the brain behind the Braincandy broadcasts which was essential to Berlin’s awareness of electronic music in the 90s, ten albums later, and the twenty-five year idea of a ”new life” – feels utterly extraordinary.

Following on from 2024’s Rave Luv EP, and last year’s Under The Ocean single, New Life presents the auditory embodiment of the sea’s eternal expanse, in all its turbulent rage, in all its chaos-calming power. When confronted by walls of machines, rather than bang our heads against them with the hope of penetrating another brick – we look to nature to ask questions, and from there, escape with our answers. Nature dominates.
AA”For me,” Allien says, ”it’s a beautiful way to release this music, because I still work on remixing myself. I still work on new tracks, and I still have some material which I’m gonna release. So this New Life record or EP or music piece is an open project because I don’t want to work in the general release plan or ideas of label managers or Spotify or streaming platforms. I really want to bring something out on Bandcamp. Only one track, one edit, one remix. So I have a different way of spreading my art around.
AA”I’m a sea lover,” she adds. “I love the sea a lot. I go to different places to make pictures there, and to use these landscapes or nature images. In this frame, I feel so relaxed, and I feel that when I’m in nature or in quiet places, I have many ideas I can create better, or I fantasise better. If I go into a studio in a city, I can produce music, and I can create. But if I go to places with more quietness around me, I can impress myself better, and I feel it more around me. Because there’s more time, you know. And I like more time for everything. So this album is a reaction. Also, the most important thing is that I like it and I feel it.”

The reaction in question demands we pay attention. A call to arms. The tracks on New Life will undoubtedly be played in clubs across the globe where the dancefloor morphs into a battleground and communities unite in moments of internal conflict and political crisis. However, with New Life being the multiform album that it is – experiencing the album in nature is the best way to absorb the messages that thread themselves throughout each darkwave-dinked jolt and hypnotic, column-toppling techno ebb. It’s in this environment where, unplugged from the speed and size of the city, we can literally represent the notion that animates Be Your Own Leader into unruly focus (and I’m trying not to dampen the point by saying such an individual stance against the murderous mechanisms of the modern globe is achieved by Cruising – a fabulously dark, oceanic grind of an opening track).

However, Be Your Own Leader cruises forward with a slowly-unfolding surge of haunted melodic vapours hanging above the immovable, interlocking footsteps. Trees are bent like sheets. Warbles and flutters of electronics mutate and move in the air, in the sea (who can tell?) like liquefied cadences of stainless steel. Allien’s transformed voice echoes throughout the fog. Similarly, Lights Off bounces and explodes with intensely mesmerising power.

Throughout, we get a glimpse at a forest from a perspective both above and on the ground: spells of orgasmic exhales, the incessant drive and clatter of biomechanical rhythms, hallucinatory spells of plasmatic lasers, amorphous globules of sounds shiver and stain the air. At the expense of sparing the last strands of sanity, we disconnect from one thing and uncompromisingly introduce ourselves to another.

This is a very different kind of inspiration that the city accommodates. And out here – virtually every track – songs of love, songs of loss, songs of being found, songs of getting lost, songs of remembering, songs of forgetting, possess the sentiment of ‘Be Your Own Leader’ in their own unique way.
AA”I wanted to call the album Be Your Own Leader, or Nobody Needs Any Leader,” Allien states. ”And I changed it to New Life because for me, ‘ Nobody Needs Any Leader ‘ means ‘New Life’ Because if you wouldn’t have a new leader, if you wouldn’t have no leaders, we would be in a feeling of being our own leader, that you have your life in your hands. If you’re manipulated, you understand you’re manipulated, and maybe you get information to grow with education or something, and then the picture changes: the situation you are in, the situation other people are in, or the situation the world is.
AA”I think it’s important to be your own leader. When you work for a company, and they ask you to work more, to be better, they put pressure on you. Because I think the best working situation would be for everybody six hours each day, because then you can concentrate, you can do your life. But we are in the industrial area, so it’s a form of encasement of your placement.”

Surrounded by lakes and rivers. Pictures put together. To impress oneself into a space is the work of someone who desires to be a piece of the scenery as though wanting to be projected, and printed onto the canvas as dog paws would indent the surface of yet-to-dry cement. It’s here where Allie can unleash and harness the fantasy at its unconditional apotheosis. Where time doesn’t so much stand still, or elongate – but dissipates into a superficial system that aims to make people believe that every exhaled breath, and every drop of blood, is there to keep the clock satiated.

If the idea, and the apprehension of a new life was the source of inspiration, its recording and production process was a little different. First recorded in Berlin with a primitive, demo-style approach, then to Miami, then to Ibiza (initially for a holiday, but then turned into work) – the album is a cohesive body of songs, rather than a nomadic assortment of scattershot pieces. Allien’s entire field of vision, her whole panoptic targeting of the album’s conceptual weight, is why the album feels like a world unto itself, rather than a succession of interlinked pieces connected by a theme. They are one. They are whole.

What does this process look like then?

”I hold a diary of sounds,” Allien explains, ”and then I go and close it with the ideas I had and make it complete in terms of making the sound better, making the beats perfect, going in the club, listening to the tracks, playing them out, changing something however I want to have it the way I play as a DJ, and how it works for me when I play it. It became the whole story of a lot of courage and also not running behind any trend. I don’t want to be a trendsetter. Because every trend has an end. So for me, I don’t have to ask myself; I just do the tracks.
AA”The way I’m playing is also in places where my agent books me, where I fit in. So everything is very honest. It’s not someone trying to be someone trying to do something or being in the studio and thinking about my social media or thinking about marketing. This was more like doing a track by track. The way my ears say yes. And my ears say yes when I see [myself] do the music, and then I see the club I played, and I love to play, and then I come back as a flashback. Then I see myself in the club and the people dancing.”

Like Under The Ocean was dedicated to Allien’s late mum who attended her shows, Allien’s mother’s presence permeates the album’s themes of movement, optimism and regeneration. A social worker and strong influence on Allien (as well as her sister, her household growing up in Berlin was centred around strong, female role models) Steh Auf is a slab-splintering ray of atmospheric techno – it sways dark at the edges, heaving formations of frosty glass bright at the core, ambient textures spill over the seam, warm-blooded drums sweat against a molten axis, occasionally peppered with hisses of melodic arpeggiations just fizzing below the point of total industrial distortion.
AA”Steh Auf is again for my mom because she died and I was writing this when she still was alive,” explains Allien. ”And Steh auf means get up. It’s about… When you get up every morning, also when you get up, this means you have a lot of courage. So that you’re not just staying in bed and you die. You just get up every morning, you go to work, you do these things. For me, this is already to take your life in your hands. You wake up in the morning, and you do your things. It’s already a big point, a big movement. This is you. This is about my mom because she was so sick and old, and she gets up every morning with all this pain and her brain is not working well. But she gets up every morning; she’s eating. She does her thing. You can be sick. Somebody left you, or you lost your job, or you have no job. Wherever you are, you are there. You exist. This is wonderful.”

Other tracks on the album fall into this idea of seizing hold of each moment for fear it might suddenly evaporate or turn to water trickling between the fingers – about being brave enough to be ourselves when stood at the foot of an avalanche of spine-snapping frustration, about encouraging the heart to bleed through the sleeves as a badge of pride we all share, and rejoice in the spirit-rejuvenating sections of the average day’s series of ordinary episodes that, looking back, come caked in a particular kind of appreciation now that we made it through them alive.

In Fantazy, we find Allien’s voice taking on new forms of uneasy allure and exotic drama. Grotesque shapes of expression contused salivate from the lips of a mutant pining for love. Sampled orgasmic chatter. Earth unsettled by processions of squelching flowers with sharp metal for petals. Grunts of drums and distant screams of slimy machines. Rhythmic tides of ice and wires. Space between the joints. Steam from the grid. Drones shoot by, observed from a break in the blinds. Something emerges from the exoskeleton and announces ”I love you so much.”
AA”Fantazy is about when you fantasise something which is not really for other people around you. It’s only for you. When you are in your own world. Why does somebody have to tell you what to do when you have your rhythm? Everything is about space, freedom, respect, community. I think it’s important every day to choose the right thing to do. Because every day is a diamond. But the money is faster than the conversation.
AA”I always say, I think,” Allien adds, ”the answer is…time. We have the capitalistic motor. And as long as the industrial motor is on, the industry is actually the social system. But the industry can’t be the social system because the social system is not the industry and can’t be social. Otherwise, they wouldn’t make money.”

Mein Herz (My Heart) meanwhile, kicks forward with EBM muscle and melodic gauze. Clearing the path ahead as it oozes and moves with unshakable simplicity and drive. Thick belts of rhythm and bolts of bass pop and howl. Riot suggests a blissful melody shrouded in stardust. Collections of shrapnel are alchemised into rhythms and rush throughout the whole track like an injection of electricity powering through it’s nervous system. Heaven-frequency machines dissolve and wobble. A disorienting murmuration of vocal transmissions are buried and blurred below the jammed-out tech-kraut phantasmagoria.
AAMove It is a maddening arcade game of Underground Resistance-standard techno – a delirious maze of rusty strings that shudder through states of lubricated rubber and corrugated terror, unmedicated dashboards of giddy grooveboxes and lashes of rave-birthed hyperactivity.

The notion of techno as protest was born out of Allien’s experiences in Berlin. Behind its wall, her mother suffered with the lingering impact of the Second World War; techno was termed as a means of escape from what Allien terms ”the cage” with bars ever-thickening due to the ”political disasters.” The resonance of that idea now exists in the fight for liberation – the turning of the dream into the reality, or the reality into a bad dream that can be sealed up shut and buried under the bed. The absence of any overt political message, directed to the listener via lyrical content, makes New Life’s influence more potent. If it were crammed to the brim with a series of specific politically-bludgeoning ideas, perhaps the dreaminess would just be…well plain dreary.

Rather, liberate people through the dream. Their interpretation is paramount. The lyrics they have been mishearing for the better part of their lives are more substantial to their spiritual structure than the correct lyrics.
AA”In my music, I try to let people dream with my vocals, whatever I say. To say not directly what’s going on, but there’s a lot behind. But I use only one sentence or two because I don’t want to manipulate. So I use only a little bit. Small sentences that everybody can put in their own lives. Some people, if they don’t really listen to my music, they don’t get it. They don’t have to. It’s a driving emotional journey. To bring the music in pictures, in colours, and using words too. Open the mind in specific areas. But you need time for music. To listen to music, you need time.”

The seed from which this idea of retaining the childlike superpower to sustain the spell of dreams as a defence against adulthood, Allien tells me, came from her mum and sister’s musical influence on her. My own experiences of this includes those experiences of being in the back of the car. A series of CDs stuffed into the door compartments. As though hearing things through walls. Through other people. My mistakes made sense to me, and nobody else. Those moments – those wonderful moments – cannot be underestimated in their long-lasting hold on the child. When we get older – now harbouring years’ worth of trauma, or joy – the child has grown up. But the spark in the dark that misunderstanding lyrics can afford is still remarkable.
AA”You know,” Allien says, ”when I was a child, I was listening to my mom and to my sister for music. I didn’t understand the lyrics even in German because I was a child. I didn’t have this life story already lived. So I put the lyrics in my childhood brain and fantasised about it in my way, and I saw the pictures. Later, when I understood the lyrics, I was looking at the songbooks.”

Songbooks. Record players. Jukebox singles. Soaking in the sounds and bathing in her fantasy as a child through dressing up. These memories have made a significant indentation on Allien’s life. As much as she came of age in London in 1989 in London, then returning to the city newly transformed by the demise of the divide the wall physically erected between people, and the birth of a new subcultural supernova – the new life and the need for better has been a staple piece of her history since the start.
AA”Later, when I was, I don’t know, maybe 26, reading the songbooks, you see something else the person said. Because this person is a growing-up person. So with all this experience that I understand, it’s about gay, about queerness, it’s about losing someone on the other side of the river. Queer relationship. Thousands of things I didn’t know when I was a child. And then I understood, this is so beautiful. It’s your diary of memories.”

With artwork by Pablo Rodriguez, and assisted by Enrique Gonzalez, the cover of New Life is utterly gorgeous. Allien stood on a beach. A searchlight from the stars beams down on her. Has she arrived? Will she be taken? The dream pervades the picture, as all the Stini Roehrs singles have one for this album. The sky an intense permutation of Rothko-void colours towering behind her in deep blacks and blues. It entwines with the sky to the point they become indistinguishable – but you know it’s there. The whole visual aura of this album transplants us elsewhere. The work that Stini, Kitty Schumacher, and Gabriele D’Agostino have composed for the New Life project is outstanding. A team of people invested in encapsulating the idea, in the materialisation of the dream.
AAThe main image for this very article calls to mind something of a collaboration between Terry Richardson and H.R. Giger in an S&M club. The alien monster being cradled by the porcelain diva. The images, like the tracks, are pieces drawn from a larger pool of ideas. Snippets of graphic and musical detail that will eventually (or not) ferment the imagined into the real – while still retaining its captivating dreaminess. In fact, the translation of these ideas into the realm of the real makes them even more eerie, weird, and seductive.

”The whole idea was there. I was thinking…one moment. I think I have something flying around. Let’s look in my old folders and look in my folders what I have because why I have to do something new if maybe there’s something I never used and it’s fantastic because there’s so much material what I did in the last years you can’t believe! So I started searching, making research, and then I found this picture. It’s been shot in Mexico, in the ocean. I’m standing naked in the ocean. My friend Enrico is putting light on me. This is not a normal cover. Not my face. Not my name. It’s how I feel about the tracks. I’m going to step back from this. Putting my face or whatever I want to be. Putting me in fucking fashion stuff. Like a puppet from the fashion scene. ‘Oh, I have the new season clothes on. I have the new makeup.’ I like to see it on other artists, but it’s not how I feel myself as an artist.
AA”So I saw this picture, and you could see my nipples. I asked, can you make the nipples away a little bit? And can you make the scene a little bit darker? I was looking so intense. This vibe like we are coming from the sea. If there’s water it’s it looks very silent on the top, but also it can be wavy. But inside the sea, there’s so much going on that can suck you in, or you have a new life. There’s so much life we couldn’t find out; it’s so deep. It’s also like the sky. It’s something unknown. I like the idea that the human being couldn’t find out what’s going on there. It has so much power. We need water. Our flesh is full of liquids. When we don’t drink, we die. So water is the element of life and death. I also did something here in the sea with a drone. And for me, it’s now my project to go to places where I’m anywhere I play or hang out with the communities. For example, I just did something in Barcelona, and they were saying, ‘Oh, Barcelona, I want to shoot something in the skate park. People are cruising.”

Throughout her career, Ellen Allien has addressed the idea of Techno-as-protest. It’s a philosophy open for everyone to participate in. The founder of BPitch in 1999 and the later UFO instalment as of 2018, ten albums, countless EPs, remix projects with Lebanon Hanover, Malaria! and Sad Madona on labels like Mute and Warp, compilation contributions, fifty-hour We Are Not Alone raves (and their dizzyingly prolific output of compilations under the same name, now on it’s ninth release) , major festival slots, gigs at Hamburger Bahnhof and Centre Pompidou, and anniversaries of the seminal Stadt Kind album; her work is an eternally open field of research. Upon which, the concept of Techno-as-protest, rather than as solely a slice of consumer-oriented product or celebrity-styled performance. This has always been a concept in pursuit of understanding throughout her work.
AA”For me,” explains Allien, ”techno is a protest because it’s music without somebody telling you a long story. And also, as the DJ, techno is mostly darker lights. So you are not the centre of the environment or the room. Okay, you need light. I always need light to mix. But it’s also good when the people can see you a bit, and it’s also good to see the crowd a little bit, that you can communicate, that you watch also the crowd, that everything is together. It’s just like a community who want to discover each other for real.
AA”It’s also a protest because it’s independent. And independence means you have your own YouTube channel, you have your own Instagram, you have your own everything. Your own record label. Which is easier to do these days. And it’s good that it’s possible. You can create your story. And that’s really beautiful. It’s protest because it uses people to put the money in your pocket. Most of the communities and clubs, the real clubs, they put the money back into the club or into the people, or into the community. If the club is working very well after 15 years and they make money, I’m happy. It’s not that nobody is allowed to make money, because everybody should make money, but it has to be healthy for everybody so that it’s not growing too much, and everybody has to play shit music. There must always be a place for creativity. Techno is a protest of thousands of things.”

Out of the ocean, and into the light – Ellen Allien is new life. All we needed was time.

~

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Press shot | Kitty Schumacher ©