Hanim Elias - Future Noir

Hanin Elias is a German industrial/techno artist. She was co-founder member of Atari Teenage Riot (ATR) and is currently a solo artist.
This is a soundtrack! Not like a film soundtrack but a life soundtrack. This album sits in the background to your day, the individual tracks collectively enhancing your experience, good or bad, negative or positive. Simple piano riffs layered with general electronica and sampling grace in every track, Elias still manages to approach her music with subtlety, communicating anger and frustration without compromising her feminine touch. It's nowhere near as dense as Alec Empire's incredibly harsh drill & bass, but it retains a great deal of ATR's violent future aesthetic: harsh static-drenched beats and bloody digital basslines. At its best, the album is angular and dynamic.
Of note to fans of Atari Teenage Riot is the kiss-off anthem "Iced Icon", wherein Elias rails against an unnamed -- but strongly implied -- male with control problems. "I should do what you want, / Serve in your army, / Before I'm good enough, / To please you", she sings, before continuing in the chorus on the theme of "breaking the ice" which surrounds her persecutor. Of course this is only a guess, but the lack of any Alec Empire production on Future Noir points the finger quite accusingly at her notoriously controlling former bandleader.

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