Ellen Allien, Berlin's high priestess of techno, assembled Fabric 34 as though she were taping photographs into an album. "I can remember every record being played by myself in a club," she tells us. When she hears them again, the moments come rushing back. But Fabric 34 also exercises memory in a less Proustian, more concrete way: Following a party in her flat, Allien mixed the entire set on vinyl, by hand. It was an old-school gesture for a city girl vividly aware of the past. She was there when the Berlin Wall fell, when techno began to take hold in warehouses on the east side, when revolt on the dance floor, against the old regime of acid-house, was bound up with real liberation.
This enriched idea of music brings an alluring balance of wistfulness and energy to all of Allien's work. From the get-go, Fabric 34 peers longingly backward. After jumping off with a chirpy, murky number, she summons the golden days through Larry Heard's acid classic "The Sun Can't Compare", which rides Mr. White's diva crooning, over vintage 808's and handclaps, far into house territory. (Anyone who can't handle the manic-depressive flitting might exit here.) Jamie Jones rounds back with his version of Estroe's "Driven", fattening the Dutch source material with string-laden shimmer and 303 patter, an islander's translation of tech-house.
Another "progressive" remix follows suit. Pilas, a Madrid-based DJ, pumps a regular flow of electricity into Damián Schwartz's "Tú y Yo". Before the regularity tips into monotony, clouds of tension gather on "Orderly Kaos", as Don Williams turns in a specimen of Detroit techno rippling with delayed organs and flourishes of Chain Reaction-style dub. These moments of not-quite-history stand out as the mix's most savory. Toward the end of the mix, Richie Hawtin (under his Plastikman nom de house) recasts Heartthrob's techno hit "Baby Kate" as an austere landscape of space-age noise, preserving a husk of the original motif-- a riff from the past, rather than William's riff on the past.
Next comes a loose suite of three, wrapped in a sort of supernatural gloom: From the syncopated zaps of "It Is Not Now Either" into the haunting, Eastern-tinged psychedelia of "India in Me 2" to the ghostly rattle of bells, like a swaying buoy, on "Mutter". This tinge of rootlessness returns at the end, when Allien's frequent collaborator Apparat materializes in the utopian shape of "Arcadia" (from his recent Walls LP), and we're carried upward on dreamily reverberating guitars and vocals.
This late into the mix, listeners might gravitate toward two carps. First, that Thom Yorke's politically charged "Harrowdown Hill" is out of place. Yet the track slopes into a serene, stately come-down, an island of calm floating between the anxious dark of the Finnish "Aaltovaihe" and Allien's own "Just a Woman". And the Radiohead frontman's famously dissipated squawk plays a perfect go-between, relaying pent-up anger behind the brittle façade. Second, that "It Is Not Now Either" phases messily into "India in Me 2".
While this transition may not be a slick continuity edit, like the rest of her transitions, it's no catastrophe. This was not, after all, done on a laptop: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but we have to appreciate the faith she's placed in us. Allien's brave to experiment-- and to save the imperfections. "My music isn't always easy," Allien confessed to an interviewer in 2004, "but it's always happy and light-- like the sun." Dazzlingly streaked with melancholy and shadow, Fabric 34 only half-agrees.
