Berliner Ellen Allien clearly doesn't view boundaries in quite the same way as many of her techno peers. Using terms like "fearless" to describe musicians who cycle through contrasting styles in their career often comes across as lazy shorthand for competency-- the music rarely eclipses its obvious influences. Allien has occasionally veered close to that space, although mostly there's a strong feeling of immersion in the genres she splintered off into in works like Sool and Dust. LIsm, a single track that clocks in at 45-minutes, is her most fractured work to date, a piece that veers from abstraction into song-oriented forms and through the clubby territory that made her name. It's adapted from a work she produced for a dance performance at Paris' Pompidou Centre in 2011, with Allien subsequently retooling the music she composed to give LIsm a peculiar life and feel of its own.
This is more likely to be a one-off project than a firm detachment from the scene that spawned Allien, but it's certainly something far closer to avant rock circles than it is to anything approaching dance music. As an overall work it bears few peers, although there are passages that produce a sense of familiarity. The opening guitar strum is reminiscent of the slow creep lead-in from "Nice One" by improvisational Portland troupe Jackie-O Motherfucker, while the clear-eyed pop that closes out the track is just a production budget short of Dr. Luke's domain. In between those bookends come impulses that need a road map to make sense of, although the beauty of LIsm comes from dipping in and getting lost. The sequencing is skillfully cut together, as you'd expect from someone with Allien's DJ pedigree, although it never ends up as a mere technical feat to marvel at. She's clearly more interested in digging out an emotional core to this work.
It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it. Sometimes that can produce a whole other world, a place where the reader is forced to color in the background in interesting ways; at other times it's impossible to get your bearings. LIsm is both those things, a place where the minimal techno of Sool brushes up against primal screams reminiscent of the stringy howl of Liars' Angus Andrew, only to take a thrilling left turn into gamelan-influenced percussion. At those points, LIsm forges ahead with purpose, resembling a DJ set that's part education, part historical melting pot. When it doesn't work it feels a little clunky. Sparse jazz moves collide with glacial Vangelis synths, 0PN drones segue awkwardly into classical piano, drum machines pointlessly sputter into life then fade away.
That sense of just trying stuff on to see whether it works has some merit, but it does cause LIsm to lose purpose at crucial junctures. There's a sag in the center of the piece, a feeling of Allien not keeping her eye on the bigger picture as a soupy array of styles slosh about aimlessly. It's no surprise that her exit door out of there is via the kind of thoughtful techno that harks back to her Berlinette days. But in this context it doesn't feel like a retread, instead coming across as a crucial part in the LIsm narrative, a way of figuring out how darker fare can form part of a slow build toward celestial clubland. The barbed metallic drones that guide Allien to that place are the highlight of the track, a beautiful mesh of criss-crossing figures, all set at purposefully difficult angles to one another. That's LIsm's place, looking for commonality where none exists, succeeding because it shapes conversations through the klutzy way its parts are assembled.
