FAX Records

FAX was started by Peter Kuhlman, in 1992, to sell his music.  He had been working in hard trance, but moved quickly into chill-out musics, to include long atmopsheric pieces.  The label's full name was FAX +49-69/450464, which was a contact number for Kuhlman and the label.  His Silence project recorded with Dr. Atmo in late 1992 gained some popularity, and helped to establish the label.

Kuhlman began to release CDs in earnest circa 1993, in various styles and occasionally defying category.  He kept a "Main Label", on which he released his own projects and collaborations using the name "Pete Namlook".  Additionally he created a "Sublabel" on which to release projects recorded by others, and a "World Label" where he and collaborators branched outwards.  (I don't entirely understand how a release was categorized as either Main or World; it looks as if when his collaborators was other than German, it became "World").

Most of the FAX releases - and there are 200+ of them - were printed in small batches of between 500 to 2000.  And mind you, this was before music was sold or copied via mp3 format.  A subset were released again on other labels, making them accessible to the general buying public at least in large cities.

At the end of the day Namlook recorded and/or released a huge volume of adventurous music, much of it ambient and some of it "environmental" and most of it "electronic".  And much of it rather great.  Pete Kuhlman died in his sleep in December of 2012, and the FAX story ends there.

My favorites releases are :

Dreamfish - Namlook and Mixmaster Morris make ambient music that glows and shimmers

Alien Community - sadly no clips are on youtube - Namlook and Jonah Sharp make ambient spacey sounds that mutate into slamming bouncing groove and then back again

Create 2 - Namlook and Charles Uzell-Edwards make environmental music based in part on sounds of San Francisco.

Zenith - Tetsu Inoue and Carlos Vivanco make light etherial pulse music.

Silence 2 - Namlook and Dr. Atmo outdo their debut CD with even more striking ambient music.

Traveling the Silk Route - no youtube clips - Namlook and Move D make atmospheric slow percolating ethnic acid jazz.

Elektronic - again, no youtube clips - Namlook and Material Object getting deeply into a world of processed electronic beats.

The stuff's on iTunes and elsewhere.  It's pretty great.  There's a good fan page up at 2350.org that covers and catalogues much of the label's history.