In 1992, a Frankfurt based musician named peter Kuhlmann released a 12 inch single entitled "True Colours". He had released collaborative records before in styles that might be termed New Age, Techno and Ambient, under the names of Romantic Warrior and Sequential, but "True Colours" was a watershed. Nobody wanted the track. All of the A&R managers he encountered insisted that they knew good music from boring and for them, Kuhlmann's work fell into the latter category.
So with a change of identity to Pete Namlook, a meeting with a distributor who was prepared to take a chance, and an album collaboration with Dr Atmo called Silence, the Fax label was born. Within one year, Namlook had released 101 products by 26 artists including himself, and launched another two labels. Using a traditional carrier of 'hard copy' vinyl and CDs, he was proposing a future vision of 'soft' music on demand. Limited edition releases ensures that each record sells and an equitable split between label and artist means that the musicians can make a living from relatively low sales.
The flow continues unabated, and in recent time, musicians such as Bill Laswell, Robert Musso and Ritchie Hawtin (FUSE/Plastikman) have been added to the Fax list of Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), Tetsuo Inoue, Mixmaster Morris, Jonah Sharp and many others. A fervent believer in the creative potential of analogue synthesis, Namlook has been working for eight years on instrument and tuning development in close contact with Oskar Sala. Now in his eighties, Sala is one of the pioneers of electronic music and, through the association of Namlook and Sala, the music has returned to ideas that were diverted by the commercialisation of synthesis.
Since the weekly release schedules of Namlook's Fax, Yesterday Tomorrow and Ambient World labels run out music like a hot fax machine, the obvious medium with which to talk to Namlook about his music was fax. The interview was conducted over a two week period earlier this summer. The dates of each fax are shown at the beginning of the questions and answers.
20.6.94 Can you tell me about the transition from your previous musical phase and why you chose to change identity by reversing your surname?21.6.94 I'm basically not interested to talk too much about what you call 'Ambient' music. I never had an intellectual approach towards this music and I was never inspired by any other musician to do my kind of music. This music comes from my 'heart'. My musical experience was more focused on jazz and Oriental music. What you call 'Ambient' was there when I learned to play my first two chords on the guitar (1974). I went out with my father to a journey through Turkey and sat near to the water and 'played' along with it. I tried to pick up the noises and give back my feelings to the environment through my instrument.
I never stopped doing this kind of music, which for me was very emotional and melancholic. Nature was my main teacher. But I had to learn how to play my instrument. Unfortunately, it was a guitar and I had a hard time learning it (my parent didn't have the money to spend more than DM50 on an instrument for me). After I felt I learned enough I leaned more and more back to my beginnings and created music which was environment orientated. Nobody at the record companies liked it. They said it was too boring. I loved to combine all kinds of musical styles with this kind of music and this made it worse.
Hidden in a lot of my CDs are tracks from my beginnings (1976-81), which I mastered from cassettes and de-noised them digitally. Alternatively, I simply recorded them with 'new' (old analogue stuff) equipment. The only records I heard at that time which had to do with that kind of music were Tangerine Dream's Rubycon and Phaedra. They didn't inspire me, but I liked them a lot. (By the way, the first time I listened to a Brian Eno record was in 1993 after I bought some of his CDs in a Virgin Megastore for a 'Nice Price'). I got more inspiration from Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek who are jazz musicians. This has more to do with the way I develop my melodies than with my musical style.
I was fighting a lot against the narrow minded view that, ie Techno has to have 4/4 bass drums and so on. In the music that is released on Fax, Yesterday Tomorrow and Ambient World, there is no restriction or rule. In the music of our time it should be possible to combine any kind of style, develop new styles, and go beyond...far beyond everything which existed before.
In music our biggest problem is the tonal system we are using in Western society (and MIDI orientated instrumentation). This is another point I have an answer for but I want to talk about it after the summer. To solve this problem not only for one CD but for everyone who wants to use it, I have to do some technical (software) research. After the summer, I will come up with a solution.
Don't think that I don't know any theories and I'm afraid of them. I studied the science of music at Frankfurt Goethe University and besides this, my hobby was to find out about all kinds of tonal systems, scales, chords and notations. I don't know every single thing but I tried to learn as much as possible to discover a new way. And I learned that there exists the answer to the final question about sound and music: NATURE.
To talk and write about it, and to put it into different categories places restrictions on the music. The intellectual approach kills the freedom of emotional and instinctively created music. What you call Ambient or environmental or whatever was invented by nature. There is no human who invented it or did it first. Due to the fact that we all killed our environment and not try to save our dying nature (or what is left of it), people are starting to listen to environment orient sounds. They don't think about it; it just happens that they like this music. Even though in the music itself there might be no natural (or industrial) sounds it is clear (to the subconscious) where this music is coming from.
It is the first music which is not built on musical laws and which is emotional and environment oriented and beautiful at the same time. For a short portion of time this was the case at the end of the last century when composers like Debussy and Ravel kicked musical laws in favour of impressionistic sounds. But the head oriented people took over. It is silly, but to be intellectually accepted by critics you have to show them interesting theories. You can shit on paper. The only thing that you need is a good explanation (or marketing) to sell it as art.
A lot of producers nowadays have no theoretical background. They don't know about keys and things like that. But this is the great advantage. They do music just by instinct and the musical elements in their compositions that survive are the ones which sound interesting to them. There is a possibility for beauty to survive in its purest form. My approach is similar, but I come from a different background. For me, the main sentence came from Charlie Parker: "Learn every single bit about your instrument and then forget about it and just play." As for changing my name, Pete Namlook is just a joke, a persiflage on pseudonyms. Why did I do Techno as well in the beginning? Well, I liked Kraftwerk, Neu, and stuff like that and for me, my definition of Techno was a vehicle to get the people to listen to my music through the B-sides. The 'real thing' for me was (what you call) 'Ambient'. Environmental describes it better, but as I said before, definitions don't count.
20.6.94 The structure of your business - Fax - seems based on ideas which are creative, political, economic, ecological, perhaps spiritual (in the late 20th century, can we divide these categories of experience, even?). Could you elaborate on the way in which your release schedules, collaborations and contracts interlink with your wider beliefs?
21.6.94 There is a big sell out going on and I am trying to gather together as many artists as possible to form a global 'Ambient-Environmental' movement which is, in the first place, music and not money oriented. It is important that the musicians make their living from music and if they participate in a good way then they are able to survive also from smaller quantities. I give two thirds of the plain profit to my artists and people like Dr Atmo make their living from it, even though I only sell a limited run of 1000 copies of each release. They gain DM5 from each item.
To release at least one CD a week like I do with my labels is a better approach than to sell millions of just one project a year. The listener has the possibility to hear the sound of many different musicians and styles. The music has a higher value doe to its limited run and if somebody has a CD that somebody else does not have, then they can exchange it. This is the best way to spread the idea of the music and keep its cult status at the same time.
I hate categories like 'House', 'intelligent', 'electronic, 'Industrial'. It is too easy to put excellent musicians like Richard James, Bill Laswell, Geir Jenssen, etc into the 'right folders' leaving the others outside. Hundreds of other musicians and I have done this music for a long time. Now that there are some silly words to describe this music it has become popular, leaving others who were far ahead of our time...outside.
I can't say that I'm glad I'm now successful, nearly 20 years after I started to make this kind of music. More important than this is the obligation to give as many musicians as possible the ability to make their kind of music and to let them participate in a way that they are able to make their living from it. If we do not sell out to the major labels, keep our music special, be more diverse, stay independent in music and finances and don't just focus on sales figures, then we are able to change more than just chords.
21.6.94 Your story about Turkey is intriguing. Could you elaborate a little on your family background and talk about your emergent sense of the natural world?
26.6.94 My family has no roots in Turkey. It was just a holiday, but ever since this holiday I have been fascinated by the kind of nature I saw and the sounds of oriental musicians. My family basically comes from the working class. There was nobody in my family who had a cultural/musical background. But all of them were very connected with nature and natural elements.
Most influential since my childhood was a grand-uncle who was living in the house that I now live in when I'm in the countryside. He was a shoemaker from the 1920s and when he earned enough money during the week he closed his business and walked through the beautiful countryside, exploring the environment, having a garden and wandering around.
He ate mostly homegrown stuff and healed injuries with herbs and other natural medicines. He drank herbal tea which he collected all the time and tried to live in perfect harmony with nature. He showed me a lot of natural secrets and sharpened my senses towards the natural environment. Also, he was the one who taught me about sharing things, taught me that you can't take anything with you when you die and that the biggest problem in the world is that people are all hunting for the biggest profit and are not focused on helping each other. Of my entire family, he had the biggest influence on me and his messages are the ones which make the best possible sense to me up until today.
21.6.94 This idea that nature (or natural principles) is the key to music's powerful influence; can you talk a little more about this? How is nature the answer to the final question about sound and music? And these machine rhythms that fill the air: are they the final pulsations of the transition from industrial to post-industrial society? Or just a phase in the acceptance of MIDI?
26.6.94 Referring to our musical relationship towards nature, we are still not at a stage to create sounds which possess the musicality of a blackbird. In music there are things you can't notate, like feeling, groove, etc. When you listen to Seasons Greeting =3D Spring, you will realise that there are bird noises in the background. There was a blackbird at my house that I recorded for two hours. It sang for one to two seconds every two to three seconds very constantly. When I cut this 'song' on my computer and I looked at the waveform you could see the rhythm on it. It never got boring, even if it would have lasted several hours more.
Another example: sit under a tree and look at the shadows of the branches and leaves. It's the same picture but it changes all the time. This looks simple but try to convert these simple movements into music and you'll find a job for a lifetime. The problem about our 'human' music is that it's far too static to be interesting for a lifetime. Our tonal system with major and minor chords and 12 tones which are so perfectly interpolated is so poor, cold and 'plastic' that if we used it more and more in the future we would never reach the beauty of the most easy natural noises.
Therefore, I will change the entire tonal system and make it possible to use it via MIDI. This needs serious programming and that what I'm doing just now during the summer. When I'm ready I can tell you more but until then I want to save the energy for reaching this aim.
About tuning and perfection. Perfect tuning, rhythm and arrangement is against natural feelings. Of course, you can't just detune the guitar to make it sound natural. You have to have a lot of experience until it sounds good. The big secret of tuning and playing an instrument is to awaken harmonics from your instrument. You play a chord and you hear several overtones. Everything is resonating. In India, for example, it is very common to have sympathetic strings on the instrument which enhance the effects of resonance (if they are tuned well) and the special bridge at the end of the strings provokes harmonic overtones even if you play just one tone.
The same is true of rhythms. The machine rhythms are, in fact, just a phase in the acceptance of MIDI. It is easy to program them and everybody thinks that if they program everything on 16th notes it will be fine. There are only some artists who understand how to program rhythms like Richard James, Kraftwerk, Ritchie Hawtin and a few others.
To bring the rhythm to life is very complex and has a lot to do with the organic feeling of shifting. And mainly it has to do with listening and not looking. If producers would listen more instead of looking at their machines or computer screens, half of the work would have been done. This is another good thing about old analogue equipment: it fills in the slight mistakes and never plays back exactly the same thing, even though the producer is looking at the LEDs of the rhythm machine or the tuner and thinks that everything is 'perfect'.
Listening to and learning from the environment is the first step. And in nature, nothing is perfect. Even if it seems that way, there is no repetition in anything. The waves that come from the sea. They hit the coast all the time in a slightly different way and for millions of years. You could by the seaside and listen to this noise for hours and hours without getting bored by it.
28.6.94 Do you feel part of a specifically German electronic music tradition? Did this feel like a tradition, in fact, when you were growing up? Did you sense any connection, or can you see any connection with hindsight, between this embrace of new technology and the evolution of post-war German society?
6.7.94 I'm very careful with questions like this. The people who listen to my music and follow my way should judge if I'm a part of this 'German music tradition'. I don't like the Germans too much (although I am German) and so I'm not too crazy to be connected to German things. This has nothing to with the artists and electronic music scene; it's more about the other 99 per cent of arrogant and egocentric 'old school' Germans.
Artists talk the same language all over the world. This is what I found out through my collaborations. And German electronic musicians talk 'Electronic Music' and not 'German Electronic Music' language. I'm sorry to be a bit sensitive in this direction but the latest development in Germany shows me that there is too much fascistic energy still in this country.
Electronic music in this country started with Hindemith/Trautwein and Oskar Sala. This, for me, is the tradition I see myself composing and working in. All the other artists were more inspired by the WDR studio in Cologne when they started. I asked Sala once - he is not connected at all with Stockhausen, they have nothing to do with each other. Sala made the mistake of keeping more to himself, keeping his secrets for his work. So nobody actually realised there was something else going on. Eight years ago he opened his doors because he realised that, if he dies, his secrets die with him.
When I was 10 my first record was Emerson, Lake And Palmer and I was amazed by the synthesiser sounds. The next records were Kraftwerk, Walter Carlos - Switched On Bach, Pink Floyd - Meddle, Can - Tago Mago. Of course, these were my first influences and contact with this music, but I was always interested in the origins of this synthesiser music. And when I met Sala, I knew what my direction was.
I haven't talked about it too much in other interviews. I wanted to wait until I finished my biggest project until now: the programming of the Subharmonic scale and chords in connection with MIDI.
The new technology was embraced before the war in Germany, since the 20s. During the Nazi regime, Oskar Sala had luck, because to have modern advanced technology which was ahead of its time was one part of the Nazi propaganda. They complained about some compositions but...nevertheless, Sala had good luck. He hated the regime as did all the good artists of that time, but he survived.
The development of electronic music in Germany has a lot to do with possibilities. In the 20s, Telefunken supported the Trautonium and in the 60s the WDR Cologne helped the scene. Stockhausen, in fact, is also very connected with the EMS Synthi. The Russian composer Zinovieff started EMS in London and Stockhausen was like an adviser on the features the Synthi should have. The synthesiser equipment at WDR studio is mainly EMS oriented. Without the EMS Synthi, the evolution of the electronic music scene would have been completely different.
28.6.94 Coordinating the production and associated business of your label must be extremely time consuming, considering the release schedule. How do you also manage to enter the state of 'nature consciousness' (if we can call it that) which is the source of your music?
6.7.94 I go to my country house weekly, where there is only nature in the neighbourhood and I compose stuff over there. Namlook III, for example, was completely produced over there. I have some land and a garden in which I work; as I said, I still have many memories of my Granduncle, who gave me a complete nature oriented point of view.
I finished the programming of the subharmonic generator just before I left for Berlin. I checked the notes and chord combinations with Oskar Sala on Saturday 3 July before I used it on Sunday morning, 9am, as part of my live performance at the Interference Festival. This was the premiere of this sound outside the productions of Oskar Sala. He was the only one who used these kinds of chords.
During the performance, I also used 'normal' well-tempered chords to show the difference in a musical way. When I finished, Renaat from Apollo/R&S didn't stop talking to me. He was most euphoric and enthusiastic about it. This was for me the biggest compliment from a man who stands in direct competition with me, and who has a lot of brilliant artists.
The sound of the subharmonic chords has a certain flair you can't describe. It is warm and ancient and perfect harmony at the same time. i would like to spread the idea and I'm open to share my knowledge and the programming with other producers. Even for the non-notation people, it is easy to create these chords. I asked Oskar Sala if he set up some laws of the 'right way' to use these chords and he said, "There is no law. Just try the different combinations of tones and you will find out yourself. There are no false tones. Just judge by your ear."
So we don't have to set up rules. Use them and then break them. Create new rules, as with the well-tempered scale. We save the time of hundreds of years by simply stating from the start: "What sounds good to you is the right thing."
This article first appeared in 127 (September 94).
1998 The Wire.