Last year, Apparat (aka Sascha Ring) released the excellent Silizium EP, which contained the song "It's Gonna Be A Long Walk," one of my favorite songs of 2005. Although I wasn't completely excited about Ellen Allien's last album Thrills, she's been a consistently exciting artist, and I was curious to see what the two would cook up together when it was announced they'd be releasing an album together.

Orchestra Of Bubbles is the result of their efforts, and other than a couple small lags, it's one of the more exciting electronic releases that I've heard in some time. The work of the two artists seems to fit together and overlap just about perfectly as razor sharp beats and cracking production mixes with some nice textures and vocal-driven tracks for a consistently fun album.

"Turbo Dreams" opens the release strong as a gurgling synth bass flows underneath some scorching guitar-esque riffs and crisp beats that snap and pop in all the right places. "Way Out" follows, and it finds Allien adding vocals over a blistering, electro-tinged track that's downright poppy as it progresses through a couple brisk verses and a soaring guitar closing section.

A large part of the album is instrumental, and while the duo manages to keep things together most of the time, they seem to lose focus in a couple places, as on the old-school pitch-bending weirdness of "Do Not Break" and the five-minute "Under," where almost three-fourths of the track passes before much of anything happens. Apparat takes lead vocals on only a single track on the disc, and from the sounds of "Leave Me Alone," he should have maybe done it a bit more often, as the string-laced, lurching track is one of the most outstanding on the album. The short "Metric" is just as solid, tying string stabs with brisk, percolating electro production. An excellent album, Orchestra Of Bubbles should appeal to fans of either artist, or those looking for a slab of brisk electronic pop to blast this summer.