Once upon a end-of-the-Cold-War-time in Frankfurt, a jazz musician walked alongside the river Main. Suddenly inspired, he unpacked his guitar, and began to play into the environment, reflected on the musical system with the player and world. Peter Koolman later mentioned that moment as the beginning of a new direction and professional ambition.
For two decades to follow, he would be known by an anagram, Pete Namlook, producing music continuously, and help define the electronic ambient category by sheer volume alone. When he died in 2012, his record label, FAX +49-69/450464, and its various imprints, had released over 450 albums.
1994
On a hot July ’94 day in the East Bay, I found Rasputin Music down Hesperian Boulevard. An hour later, having pawed every disc in the experimental and ambient bins, I returned to the car with three new albums.
- The Orb: Live 93
- Negativland: Over the Edge Vol. 5: Crosley Bendix – The Radio Reviews
- FAX Label: FAX Compilation
Compilation Games
Compilations are like sonic mission statements. Take Sub Pop 100, the love letter seed of a garage-brewed rock art that boiled out of bars and record stores in the 80s. From Albini to Shonen Knife, just commercial enough. The album was a fair sample of the Sub Pop repertoire and future.
FAX Compilation is a thumbnail of the label’s output, much of it produced and directed by Namlook, who emphasized speed and fluidity in production. Hearing it today, something it had in 1994 is missing: novelty. After thirty years, the ubiquity of ambient music means we find it at every liminal opportunity, every commercial context; film scores, TikToks, hotel lobbies, airport queues, massage tables, dental chairs.
I continue to love FAX Label for many reasons but there are consequences to Namlook’s production ethos that some critics have decried “quantity over quality.” The mysterious collaborator and disappeared artist, Tetsu Inoue, once quipped about a tedium in all the “woooooOOOOOoooooooOOOOooo” in the genre. Some of that fatigue can lurk around the FAX catalog, if taken too seriously or listened to too closely. But maybe this is why eletronic ambient has found itself placed as it has, as wallpaper music.
You can hear for yourself in these videos of the tracks on Disc 1.
1-1 Sad World – Terasury
1-2 Ambiant Otaku – Holy Dance
1-3 From Within – Sad Alliance
1-4 Silence – Heaven
1-5 Music For Films – Movement 5
1-6 I.F. – Kisy Loa
1-7 4Voice – 4VI Outro
Note: Sad World
The first track, Terasury, from the first album of a collaboration between Dr. Atmo (Amir Abadi) and Ramin (Ramin Naghachian), as Sad World. They would release three self-titled FAX albums over three years.
Nagachian passed in 2012, the same year as Namlook. Abadi relocated from Frankfurt to Berlin, following his day-job work as an architect, and continues to produce as Dr. Atmo under a variety of project names.
Note: Richie Hawtin as Sad Alliance
Richie Hawtin
In the liner notes, the only name I recognized was a big one, by the early 90’s, Hawtin had already +is a techno star, but his work for and with Namlook remain some of my favorite electronic ambient music journeys.
Note: Tetsu Inoue as Ambiant Otaku
One of the earliest artists to begin producing with Namlook was Tetsu Inoue, who released solo and collaborative albums for FAX, including a duo with Namlook over a four-album series called 2350 Broadway (Inoue’s home studio address at the Bretton Woods building in New York) released over the span of FAX Label history. His are some of the most surprising tracks across the catalog, especially his solo works which may be for a lack of Namlook’s direct interventions. I’ll never know for sure; Inoue disappeared from the world around 2007.
