Pete Tounshend

Alto saxophonist Pete Brown has been showing up on Keynote and Savoy reissues for years, but seldom if ever has there been an entire package devoted to recordings made under his name. The Classics Chronological series has accomplished many impressive feats, but this disc deserves special attention. Brown brought excitement and sonic ballast to nearly every band he ever sat in with. His works with John Kirby and especially Frankie Newton are satisfying, but this CD contains the very heart of Brown's artistry. It opens with "Cannon Ball," a boogie-woogie from 1942 sung by Nora Lee King. This relatively rare Decca recording features Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Hamilton, and Sammy Price, the pianist with whom Brown would make outstanding music a bit further on down the road. Similarly rare and even more captivating are two extended jams recorded in Chicago in April of 1944. Brown's quartet on this date consisted of electrically amplified guitarist Jim Daddy Walker, bassist John Levy, and drummer Eddie Nicholson.

A less-than-characteristically beat-oriented collaboration with Namlook and Biosphere's Geir Jenssen on the former's noted Fax label. It's a nonetheless stellar four track CD, with lush, well-composed material split evenly between uptempo feet movers and sprawling, stirring ambient. Reissued by Ambient World with different artwork.

Pete Namlook was one of the most influential protagonists of ambient music during the 1990s. Inspired by Oskar Sala, one of the pioneers of electronic music, Namlook focused on the untapped potential of analogue synthesizers, often developed or extended in his laboratory. After a nine-year break, the Koolfang series has been resurrected with its trademark "Deep Jazzy Chill-Out" sound, invented long before the current trend of "lounge compilations". This time Pete’s vocals are featured and his voice will go right under your skin and sonically transport you to the beach, the wind, and the salt of Fuerteventura.

Dreamfish (1993). Galactic tides of white noise usher in an expansive trip from Pete Namlook with the UK's silver-suited Ambient space cadet, Mixmaster Morris, whose eclectic DJing graced many a comedown party at the time. If Dreamfish now feels anchored in its era, it's still one of the best surviving examples of a moment when new Ambient lived a utopian dream of a technologically enlightened borderless society, sharing immersive virtual experiences around the world wide web's global campfire. There's a minty freshness and optimism about “School of Fish," while the shorter (nine minute) “Fishology” features the synthetically treated voice of Terrence McKenna, Hawaii-based futurologist and author of Food of the Gods, whose shamanistic theories of techno-paganism and extraterrestrial ancestry fit right in with the stew of ideas and New Age psychedelics which fertilized much of the early '90s Ambient scene…

Create (1994). Create is the second of the four collaborations between Namlook and Charles Uzzell-Edwards. It is one of those long, single-track Fax albums, conveniently indexed every five minutes or so. It starts out in a rather dark and sinister fashion, with a lot of rumbling and some extremely distorted voices just about audible in the background. It continues this way for the next fifteen minutes or so with various other clicks and static interference washing in and out of the of the left and right channels. By the time the fourth track rolls around the beginnings of some more atmospheric drones start to make themselves felt and we slowly drift off into deep space territory of the kind found on Shades of Orion 2…

The first two volumes of the Silence project are credited to Pete Namlook and Dr. Atmo while the following three are by Pete Namlook alone.
Silence (1992) is the one that started it all, Fax's first album release and one which caught the ear of both seasoned electronic boffins and dance fans looking for a chilled-out tonic after a night among the thumping beats of clubland.
Both this album and Silence II (1993) are collaborations with close associate Dr. Atmo and despite being at times almost new age in their choice of themes (a voice whispers sweet cosmic nothings like "we are all part of the universe") the music is outstanding. These beguiling, shimmering, reverberant landscapes are sometimes beatless and sometimes gently beaty with subdued live pads and cymbals…

The tracks on this album were created by Peter Namlook and Steve Stoll and are very much in the atmospheric, ambient, minimalist mould consisting of music which builds carefully with sonic ingredients added slowly and meticulously to the mix. Take the eponymous title track for instance, which takes over eighteen minutes to reach its conclusion, Namlook and Stoll begin with an oscillating bass sequence and gradually draft in various pulses and rhythmic textures which echo, fade and die and are then reborn in subtly different forms with different emphasis given to key rhythms or pulses, with some vaguely unsettling effects added for good measure.

Pete Namlook was one of the most influential protagonists of ambient music during the 1990s. Inspired by Oskar Sala, one of the pioneers of electronic music, Namlook focused on the untapped potential of analogue synthesizers, often developed or extended in his laboratory. This album is dedicated to Klaus Kuhlmann who died on the 14th of November 1995.

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…