Product Description

German producer Apparat (Sasha Ring) has, since the late '90s, been one of the leading lights of the IDM movement. Releasing his initial productions on his own Shitkatapult imprint, Ring has since collaborated with numerous likeminded musicians, including most notably, techno-songstress Ellen Allien. WALLS, his third full-length as Apparat, occupies a middle point between DSP-driven textures and lush chamber pop. Dispensing with the typical post-human themes of fellow electronic artists, the album is literally awash with emotional fervency. The halting dubstep thump of "Arcadia" shows Ring's flair for combining heartstring-tugging dream-pop against rugged dance floor rhythms. Raz Ohara's various vocal contributions add a further humanizing factor, his pleasing falsettolending the songs a stately charm, as in the shoegazesque "Head Up". With WALLS, Apparat proves that electronic music still has much left to offer in revamping the tried and tested pop song-form.

Track Listing

1. Not A Number
2. Hailin From The Edge
3. Useless Information
4. Limelight
5. Holdon
6. Fractales Pt.1
7. Fractales Pt.2
8. Birds
9. Arcadia
10. You Don't Know Me
11. Headup
12. Over And Over
13. Like Porcelain

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19740 in Music
• Released on: 2007-05-28
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .13 pounds

Customer Reviews

Walls IDM Cream
Perfect music. This is a superb mixture of glitch electronica, electro-pop and indie songs. Fans of The Postal Service, The Notwist and Styrofoam should snap this up fast. The beauty of Fractales Parts 1 and 2 alone will bring tears to your eyes. If you don't like this, what are you doing listening to electronica anyway?

Without walls
Despite his reputation as arch studio boffin, producer Sascha Ring - aka Apparat - makes unapologetically beautiful music. Unlike some of his IDM peers, Ring is not interested so much in abrasion or near-mathematical deconstruction, but with music that swells and soars with classical grandeur. Among current producers, he bears a resemblance in tone to Ulrich Schnauss (although the production is more technically impressive), or a less cluttered Chris Clark. Moreover, some of Walls` latter tracks build on Bladerunner-style futurism into the sonic blur of shoegaze, recalling Slowdive or, most of all, M83's brilliant `Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts`. Like these latter acts, Apparat embues the vivid, fractal soundscapes with a pop sensibility, using vocals on roughly half the tracks - largely successfully.

`Not A Number' opens `Walls` with the unashamably trippy flourescent swirl of the album cover, embellished with some vaguely orientatal strings. `Hailing From the Edge' is more contrived, one of the vocal tracks that seeks a Timbaland electro sleaziness - with the apparent intention of sounding like an edgier Junior Boys - but coming off like a Justin Timberlake album out-take. `Useless Information' picks up where the opener left off, with traditional orchestrations underpinning the cloudburts of acid effects and nebulous synths.

`Limelight' is more sonically adventurous, with fractured shards of vocal peppering between cavernous beats and other thunderous percussive effects, redolent of Kelpe's `Sea Inside Body`. `Hold On' is a closer to the R&B pretensions of `Hailin' from the Edge' but less conventionally so, built over a mutant booty shaker that is too warped to dance to. Better still is the two-piece suite of `Fractales', a psychedlic mash up of speeded up synths and ephereal textures.

But in fact it is the final third of `Walls` that works best, starting with the slow-mo digital pop of `Birds', part-Postal Service, part-Junior Boys, but more abstract than either of those acts. `Arcadia' too builds a vast, spacious neon world around a Thom Yorke-esque falsetto, in an future pop masterpiece worthy of the Flaming Lips' `Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots`. `You Don't Know Me' returns to the Vangelis-inspired cinematics of M83 while `Headup', another highlight, builds into a breathless shoegaze crescendo worthy of Slowdive or Blonde Redhead.

Despite a few misses, `Walls` is a fine album bucks a trend in which electronica seems increasingly entrenched in a creative cul-de-sac. If you like this, check out some of the aforementioned artists and albums, especially M83's `Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts` (but not their disappointing follow-up `Before the Dawn Heals Us`, or perhaps (Chris) Clarke's `Body Riddle`.