Music Review - 4Voice

I'm still working my way through Pete Namlook's recordings, and although at this point I still can't state very much with certainty, I can at least comment on one small series of his recordings.

The confounding difficulties of comprehending the extensive and varied Namlook oeuvre are apparent in the 4Voice series, one of his earliest. 4Voice originally was released in 1992 as a limited edition of only 500 12-inch EPs (good luck finding one of them!), consisting of two tracks, Music Hypnotizes and a remix (Hypnotizing Mix). 4Voice 2 came out a month later, and was also limited to 500 pressings of a 12-inch consiting of three tracks: Catching the Scent of Mystery, Catching the Scent, and The Mystery. 4Voice 3, -4 and -5 all came out over the next six months or so.

Okay, so far so good. In July 1993, Namlook compiled the EPs into a full-length CD, 4Voice, which was also released in a limited batch of 500 pressings. The CD included Music Hypnotizes (Hypnotizing Mix), Catching the Scent of Mystery and The Mystery (but not Catching the Scent), as well as selections from the other 5 4Voice CDs. 4Voice was not re-released in a full pressing until 1996.

But then things get complicated. The album 4Voice II (not to be confused with the EP 4Voice 2) was released in a set of 1000 copies in 1998, and included all new music (although there was a 4Voice 6 EP released in ’96 that included one of the tracks in 4Voice II, plus the standard remixes). 4Voice III was released in 2000 (3000 copies) with all new music and no intervening EPs. I’ve managed to get my hands on copies of 4Voice I and III, and am still looking for II, not to mention EPs 1 through 6 for their remixes.

The 4Voice I album introduced massive melodic and harmonic structures to the minimalist 4/4 beat-oriented “rave” music of its time. Like the 4Voice EPs, the 4Voice album was mainly a techno album, although Namlook’s version of techno was a mixture somewhere between rave, his idea of trance music, and his signature ambient and downbeat sounds. Music Hypnotizes, a quintessential Namlook trance track, became a club hit in Frankfurt. With its catchy melody, Music Hypnotizes still remains popular today, and was re-released in 2000 as 8Voice - Music Hypnotizes 2000 on the German dance label “Go For It!,” together with Anemra from 4Voice II on the B-side.

To give you an idea of what 4Voice is like, imagine that you’re a young German living in Frankfurt back in 1993, and you go out to a rave on a Friday night, and the music is booming, and the place is packed, and the lights are flashing, and the ex is starting to really kick in. Here’s a picture to give you a visual:Now, at one point, a slamming 4/4 beat has you out on the dance floor and you’re gyrating and jumping up and down, when suddenly the beat drops, and a voice over the loudspeakers shouts out, “You’re not supposed to move them,” but then the beat kicks right back in and everybody laughs and goes on dancing because, well, it’s physically impossible not to move them when you’re rolling like this and the music’s moving through your body, and you and the crowd are one teeming mass of sweating, undulating, sexually available bodies, and you realize the command not to move was not the d.j., but just another element thrown into the mix, and you ask the girl dancing next to you, an incredibly hot blonde, who is it they’re playing and she yells back into your ear, “Namlook.”

You detect an accent and you’re not sure what she just said, and then you realize that she’s East German, and you have mixed feelings about this, because while you’re glad about the recent reunification and all that, most of the East Germans you’ve met have been kind of culturally deprived from all those years of communist rule, and, well, dorky, but this girl is gorgeous and you find yourself staring at her boobs through her sweat-soaked blouse as you shout “What’s a Namlook?” and she replies that she’s got the CD in her pack and if you really want to know what it is, we can go back to your place and listen to it.

Fast forward to two hours later and you and the hot East German are lying exhausted on your bed and 4Voice is playing over the stereo, but the music has morphed from the throbbing techno beats that had so invigorated you earlier into a strange, spacey sound that you can’t find any foothold in, so you just relax and mind and body drop away, and pretty soon you don’t even know your own name as you and this East German become one, drifting in a cosmos of your own invention.

4Voice is sort of like that. Interestingly, Namlook eventually retired from the rave genre and soon began recording almost exclusively in his “new ambient” phase. I don’t have 4Voice II, but 2000’s 4Voice III was a return to the rave vein, but with added slabs of beat-oriented ambience. Dedicated to “the place of mankind in the vast universe,” this recording has a strong concept character as it drives through space from ambient to trance to lounge and back again to trance.

And all that’s just the 4Voice series – three difficult-to-find albums, six impossible-to-find EPs and one dance remix (by my count) over an eight-year period, all with similar titles (e.g., 4Voice 3 and 4Voice III), most of which saw no more than a couple thousand copies released - and it’s not even in his signature style of music!