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Syn II - PK 08/162 Release Date: 15 April 2002 Limitation: 2000 Töulin - Spirit of the Earth 23.11 A Meditation on Modern Philosophy 15.30 Mindlab 9.48 Night Time Pleasures 3.12 all tracks written by Pete Namlook
Toulin - Spirit of the Earth - This is quite a long track, at 23 minutes long, but unlike some, it doesn't outstay its welcome. The first few minutes are a build up of a driving trance rhythm and beat, quite harsh, and recognisable as quite similar (in production sound at least) to Psychonavigation 5 - not a good sign. But the track soon builds up to arrive at a Namlook space-melody, perhaps reminiscent of something like SHADO - eerie and yet wonderful. At around 9 minutes this all fades away to leave some nostalgic Namlook ambience and guitar. And the remainder of the track consists of these elements repeating, building up and fading again, and punctuated by samples from the film Final Fantasy : The Sprits Within. It's a kind of old skool trance flavour but brought up-to-date by Namlook with an ear for melody and polished production......and what Faxhead wouldn't enjoy that?
A Meditation on Modern Philosophy - "What if a cyber brain could possibly generate it's own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?"...a good question, sampled from the anime Ghost In The Shell, but you don't get the answer here. What you do get is immediately recognisable (to my ears at least) as absolutely classic Namlook ambience. Wonderful, whooshing, serene and with a sense of absolute mystery about it....music for watching the stars at night...and philosophising of course! The closest I can compare this to is maybe some of the Air 2 ambience, but with a more polished production. About halfway through some tabla come in for the remainder of the track. Beautiful.
Mindlab - Again, feels like an "old skool" trance sound being updated, which features the familiar sound of Jenny Gibberts haunting vocals. Enjoyable stuff, perhaps just a fraction too long at nearly 10 minutes.
The final track, Night Time Pleasures is only 3 minutes long, and is quite different to other tracks on this album, being more of a dark, slow clanking kind of track....it doesn't really have long enough to make any kind of impression.
(review by AdAckBar1972)
The first track, "Töulin - The Spirit of the Earth" , is already known from the audio-preview here on 2350.org. PN combined fine grooves and basslines with a ear-catching melody, added some fabulous voice-samples and a lot of his typical drone-sounds to take us on a long (23:11 mins, to be exact) and interesting trip. Check out the break at around 9:25, an excellent change to the whole track with another beautiful Namlook-guitar-part. All in all, really nice.
Track 2 could have fit perfectly to the whole "Silence"-story. "A Meditation on Modern Philosophy", nothing more to be added. Beautiful soundscapes underlined by a light percussion-rhythm and, again, a really cool vocal-sample at the beginning. As a classic Silence-lover, for me it's one of the best of Pete's tunes so far this year. A classic.
Once again, some droning and trance-typical choir-sounds kick off the third track. "Mindlab" is another fine and slow trance-track as we already heard on the last 4Voice-disc. The arpeggio-sounds are once again underlined by Jenny Gibbert's beautiful voice.
"Night Time Pleasures" - A light groove combined with namlook-like droning sounds and very deep voices bring the whole album to an quick end. But why is it edited down to 3 mins? Years ago, PN filled albums with stuff like that. Once again I have to ask myself if Namlooks hard-disc-recorder auto-stops at 50 mins, a fine album, but imho far too short. Even the last track could have easily been around 15 mins...
(review by Sven Kössler)
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