Fax+49

Film, television, and video game music composer Daniel Pemberton got his start in avant-garde and ambient electronic music, influenced as a teenager by statuesque electronic artists such as Jean Michel Jarre, Tomita, and Vangelis. Pemberton began collecting keyboard gear from an early age and wrote a tips column for a video game magazine to earn enough money for increasingly high-end equipment. He also began recording his own compositions, and passed a tape on to Mixmaster Morris at one of his gigs. When word (as well as additional tapes) continued to spread, Pemberton recorded his debut album, Bedroom, which gained release in late 1994 for Pete Namlook's highly collectible Fax Records.

A condensed version of a six-hour composition premiered in Canada in May of 1994, Meloche's debut for the Fax label incorporates elements of city ambiance (buses, crowd noise, radio signals, etc.) and electronic feedback in organic, cyclical arrangements. Somewhat laborious over the course of its 72 minutes (let alone six hours!), Urban Myth, much as its source material, works best as aural wallpaper; a suggestive, subconscious soundtrack to other activities.

Like its predecessor in 1994's Recurring Dreams of the Urban Myth, Wireless draws from the urban environment in assembling dense, disorganized soundscapes of subtle beauty. Unfolding slowly over the course of an hour, Wireless, as its name suggests, utilizes radio waves in combination with treated electronics, with results closer in feel to electro-acoustic experimentalists such as Carl Stone and Morton Subotnick than the warm, often more active ambient the Fax label is known for.

Outer Dark displays Bill Laswell's penchant for working out compositional ideas at great length, breaking the 20-minute barrier on both of the album's instrumental pieces. Entirely a studio creation, the music is the result of Laswell's (sounds) collaboration with Robert Musso (engineering, treatments) at Brooklyn, NY's Greenpoint Studios. The duo attempts to shape a composition out of the dark ether on the opening "Chakra." It begins with a buzzing sitar drone (providing the Eastern flavor common in Laswell's music) and strummed guitar emerging from the murk. Disappearing and returning throughout, the elements take on a sort of dizzying paranoia at song's end through their repetition. As for the ether itself, the musical backdrop is a drift of throbbing, amorphous ambience comprised of mildly chilling keyboard washes and tube-like breezes…

Moufang's first solo project for Fax is a pretty minimal affair, similar to the I.F. series but without quite the breadth of sounds. Moufang restricts himself to an 808 and maybe two or three synths for the entirety of the disc, which shifts track to track between moody, soundtrackish ambient and more upbeat techno- and electro-derived listening music.

More structured and less jarring than the 'X Jacks' CD with which it has similarities but no less strange in its construction of layered soundscapes and is actually more repetitive, covering rhythmic systems music, Steve Reich style layering and building, stabs of synth grandeur mixed with voice samples and rhythms so quirky you'd swear there was something wrong with the thing until you realise it's actually meant to sound like this. It's all very odd and disturbing.

Five years after his debut Krystian Shek delivers this extraordinary CD. His music presents a fresh version of both Chill Out and Techno. This CD was inspired not by the dreadful wars of our time, but by the way people treat each other when they meet by accident in everyday places such as airports and train stations. He collected these impressions and transformed them into musical ideas. He does not try to describe the meetings; instead, he reveals the different perspectives, each in their own beauty, and enables them to coexist peacefully.

The New Composers who set standards in the Russian Techno and Ambient scene now collaborate with a man who invented Ambient music in the early 80ies, Brian Eno. The music varies between the piano - charme of a russian ballet studio, pure ambience and environmental music as well as 80ies electronic instrumental and 50ies "Fokstrot" music. Simply incredible how homogenous this mixture of different musical influences sounds and which kind of special atmosphere and sound this music out of Russia has.

Both tracks start off with slow waves of ethereal sounds. During the 50 minute track, "Time - Cage," much evolution occurs. The slow melodic opening becomes a darker atmosphere. In the darker part, which takes up the majority of the song, low drones provide a foundation while wisps of air and (for a lack of a better term) spacey computer sounds flow by. There is a quiet percussion line with a cricket-sounding element that adds a sleepy characteristic. Eventually lighter or higher pitched background elements return providing a more ethereal sound late in the song. This gives way a short while later with the song ending with nothing but echoed electronic sounds surrounded in thick reverb. In every part of the song (the background drones, subtle percussion, foreground melodies and noises) there is constant, slow change…

This earlier work from Atom Heart is a far cry from what he's doing nowadays. Actually, compared to his recent output, it doesn't even really sound like the same artist. This retrospect is interesting because it shows the natural evolution that all artists undergo. This record was made at a time when Uwe Schmidt was concentrating on several styles at a time, and "Softcore" falls into a hazily defined bracket of IDM, with several tracks being quite ambient and others being just odd in general. Atom Heart is composing with a much simpler template here and resultantly the tracks sound very structured and much more mellow. All the tracks make nice well-constructed wholes, but as you let your ears wander over them all of the individual sounds are quite interesting in their own regard.