Neu! 4

AMG Review of Neu! 4

Jason Ankeny
All Music Guide

Recorded sometime in the mid-'80s but not released until over a decade later, Neu! 4 picks up where the duo left off in 1975, exploring the extremes of both white noise and ambient beauty. Like Neu! 2, the album fills out with remixes of the basic tracks, but where the earlier effort simply varied playback speeds, the material on Neu! 4 undergoes radical, even alien transformations. Much of the record predates 1990s electronic music with remarkable foresight: "Fly Dutch II" is a spacy techno loop which stakes out territory later claimed by Mouse on Mars, "Danzing" is a brutal electro experiment, and "86 Commercial Trash" is constructed around samples from German television advertisements.