Humble Beginnings

In the 1980s, Peter Kuhlman (aka Pete Namlook) started his musical career playing in the jazz-fusion band Romantic Warrior.  Obviously taking their name from the Return To Forever album, they were loosely part of a Frankfurt new age and electronic scene. Romantic Warrior released three albums, a 1985 eponymous LP, and Himalaya (1986) and Planet (1988). In my humble opinion, their fusion sound hasn't aged particularly well.

In 1991, Kuhlmann began playing techno and house music as a DJ, and he also started collaborating  under various names with other Frankfurt DJs and producers.  One of  those collaborations, True Colours, consisted of Kuhlmann, Hans Jörg Nonn (aka Non Eric), and Pascal Dardoufas (aka Pascal F.E.O.S.).  To promote Electric Man, a True Colours track popular in the Frankfurt clubs, Kuhlmann assumed the identity of Pete Namlook for the first time and started the FAX label.  True Colours, a 12" EP of remixes of Electric Man, was the first FAX release.

Electric Man is clearly house music, so named for the music played by Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse club in Chicago in the early 1980s.  By the mid-to-late 1980s, house music was popular in other major cities in North and South America and in Europe and Australia. Since the early to mid-1990s, house music has been infused in mainstream pop and dance music worldwide.

Namlook also produced and recorded electronic music in a wide range of other tyles and genres, including ambient, techno, drone, trance, EDM, psychedelic, and abstract/experimental.  No musical genre was a direct influence, though and Namlook has claimed that nature was his main teacher

This still doesn't mean I'm doing a retrospective of Namlook's discography, though.