Uffie - “Pop the Glock (Ellen Allien Bang the Glock Remix)”
Ellen Allien has had a pretty strange career. When she arrived on the scene, she seemed to many, including me, to be angling herself Bjork of techno, and her beguiling debut album Berlinette (and somewhat slept on but totally massive remix collection) played a big role in dramatizing/romanticizing the new German techno in the early aughties.
After that, though, her original work got progressively harder and less intriguingly weird, and her consistently reliably engaging remixes seemed to have dried up entirely. The one exception to this generally dispiriting trend was her marvelous collaboration with Apparat, Orchestra of Bubbles, and even that functionally only kept my expectations (apparently) unattainably high.
Luckily, it seems she’s turned a corner. Her surprisingly deep-house tinged RA mix was one of their standouts this year. (If anyone wants to send me an mp3 of the Infamous Upstarts remix of Little Dragon’s “Twice,” the vinyl-only ultra-rare set highlight, I certainly wouldn’t object). And although Uffie’s “Pop the Glock,” which began life in 2006 as a bizarre but catchy Ed Banger French touch hip-hop track, is a bit past its born on date, this remix is nothing but fresh. I particularly like the way Allien takes her time building the track, as machines whirr to life and bits and bobbles introduce themselves before coalescing into a big aqueous extended exaltation around the three minute mark. Aces.
