Fax +49-69/450464
From Within
Fax +49-69/450464 was a record label owned and ran by Pete Namlook.
After a brief period releasing mostly trance on vinyl records, he settled down into releasing ambient and ambient techno on CDs, collaborating with a lot of other influential musicians in the process.
The label was quite singular in that most releases feature Namlook himself, usually collaborating with a different person each time — including such illustrious cohorts as Biosphere, Richie Hawtin, Tetsu Inoue, Bill Laswell, Mixmaster Morris, and even Klaus Schulze.
Fax released more material than many other indie labels, despite Namlook making so much of the music himself. Granted, this is not the place to go for meticulously multitracked masterpieces. Much of the output is barely more polished than a live gig's outboard mix, and yet a lot of it is still just as compelling as more formal albums.
Being a small, niche label, each album was limited to roughly a thousand copies.[1] Combined with the distinctive and consistent artwork, this made some of the more popular offerings highly collectable, prompting Namlook to start the sublabel Ambient World to re-release the more sought-after albums.
The releases can roughly be grouped into four categories. These are easy enough to differentiate by their cover artwork, and the start of each release's catalogue number:[2]
- PK (short for Peter Kuhlmann's Label, after Pete Namlook's real name) featured Namlook either by himself or collaborating with other (usually German) artists. The artwork consisted of a black border, and a large circle with a smaller circle within it, both colour coded to represent the genre and artist respectively.
- PS (short for Peter's Sub Label) featured other artists by themselves. The artwork contained a black border, a fully fledged picture with a golden border for the large circle, and a triangle over the smaller circle.
- PW (short for Peter's World Label) featured Namlook collaborating with foreigners. The artwork featured a blue border, a large black circle, a medium oval with a fully fledged picture, and a distant planet Earth as the smaller circle.
- AW (short for Ambient World) re-released the most desirable Fax albums. Its artwork consisted of four squares.
References
- "A Fax From Fax" Pete Namlook, Aug 1994
- 1 Year — Dance Pete Namlook, 1993
External links
- "Fax +49-69/450464" Hyperreal
Record labels: Fax +49-69/450464 | Warp Records
Fax +49-69/450464: Richie Hawtin