A graphic tribute to Pete Namlook and Fax records

I can’t begin to pretend I’ve heard even a couple of dozen releases on Pete Namlook‘s Fax +49-69/450464 label (to give it its full title). But those that I did hear, and own, have stuck with me. Releases like Air (not the french duo who came later), Alien Community, Silence, Dark Side of the Moog, Sequential, Sea Biscuit and Dreamfish are all part of the ambient resurgence of the early to mid 90’s. Dreamfish was the moniker of Pete Namlook’s collaboration with Mixmaster Morris, who was a huge champion of the label and got some of it licensed to the Rising High label in the UK.

Namlook (Kuhlmann backwards, see what he did there?) was releasing an album a week at one point, starting off at around 500 copies on CD and progressing to 1-2000 at one point. He had a bewildering array of colour coded releases on various sub-labels, at least half of which he either recorded solo or collaborated on. The poster above is only a select number of titles, probably ranging somewhere from the early to late 90’s and doesn’t include any vinyl from the same time. Constant collaborators like Bill Laswell, Klaus Schulze, Ritchie Hawtin, Dr Atmo, Atom Heart, David Moufang and Charles Uzzel-Edwards (aka Pure Evil) are just some of the names you can find in the credits on the many releases from Fax.

I’d been thinking of doing a poster like this for some time, just to see what it would look like to put a ton of the earlier Fax releases together. Unfortunately it took the early demise of the label’s founder and driving force to make it happen. At one time you could spot a Fax record a mile off by the circular design, the Bauhaus font and an image that usually had early Photoshop filter experiments :) When out-sourcing design work to other people (in the case of Daniel Pemberton‘s ‘Bedroom’ album that I laid out) there were strict instructions and templates that had to be adhered to, everything had to fit into the label look. These instructions arrived by fax of course…

R.I.P. Peter Kuhlmann / Pete Namlook.

Download a high-res version of the poster HERE

20 thoughts on “A graphic tribute to Pete Namlook and Fax records”

  2. Anyone that has printed this out as a poster, I was wondering what size you had printed?
    The hi res image is 3.6MB, which doesn’t seem like it would be suitable for much beyond A4?

  6. I didn’t find this until now, and the high resolution link seems to be dead/gone.

    Can anyone help with that please?

    Mark

  7. Nice work! I’ve been working my way through the FAX catalog and it’s 100% quality stuff. Can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find!

  8. Kev – Thanks so much for this poster – it is an amazing tribute. My wife surprised me at Christmas by having it printed and framed with yellow matting and a blue frame similar to the label colours, and now it hangs on our living room wall! What a wonderful reminder of Peter and all he was able to create. Cheers.

  9. It is sad Shane but look what a legacy he left behind for people to remember him by, I sure he will be remembered for this for a long time.

  10. Hey Kev, nice work, I can’t pretend to have only heard a few of these… I was the type of nerd that listened to this stuff rather than watch deep space nine… A good buddy of mine collected EVERY release for about a ten year span… I have about a hundred of them…

    Never met pete, but had a few emails back n forth, as well, I spent a few years hocking their wares across western canada *round the same time i was hocking ninja in the mid-late 90’s*

    it is shocking, him, austin and ewan all within a few weeks…

    well, sad part is, it’s not over yet… we’re getting older and slowly we all go… ugh!

  18. Wow, what a great wallpaper !!! See a lot of my releases for FAX..
    Thanxxx Pete / enjoy the silence and rest in peace

  19. Wow, what a great wallpaper !!! See a lot of releases..
    Thanxxx Pete / enjoy the silence and rest in peace

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