Silence

I'm not saying I'm going to start a retrospective of the late German electronic musician Pete Namlook's prodigious discography, but if I were, it would start with Silence.

The album Silence was released under the band name Silence; the next volume in this series (Silence 2) was released under the name Pete Namlook & Dr. Atmo.  Namlook released the subsequent solo volumes (Silence 3 through 5) under just his own name.

The original Silence was self-released on Namlook's own FAX label on December 7, 1992 and only 500 copies were printed.  It was the first full album released by FAX and one of the first albums ever to be released solely on CD.  The track list and starting times on the video above are as follows:

1. Omid / Hope (0:00)
2. Garden of Dreams (21:58)
3. Santur (44:27)
4. Trip (54:20)

Pete Namlook was an ambient and electronic-music producer and composer.  The name "Namlook" is "Koolman," a phonetic rendering of his real name, Kuhlmann, spelled backwards.  Educated in composition at Goethe University, he was inspired by the music of Eberhard Weber, Miles Davis, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Chopin, Wendy Carlos, and Pink Floyd. Klaus Schulze and the band Tangerine Dream were significant influences.  His career focused on the untapped potential of analogue synthesizers, often developed or extended in his laboratory.

Namlook founded the FAX label in 1992. The definitive Wolf's Kompaktkiste lists 355 Namlook albums recorded between 1992 and 2012, not including remixes and compilations of existing material. He produced and recorded electronic music in a wide range of styles and genres, including ambient, techno, drone, trance, EDM, psychedelic, and experimental/abstract.  No musical genre was a direct influence, though, and Namlook claimed that nature was his main teacher.  He died on November 8, 2012 after suffering a heart attack.

Starting in 1992, Dr. Atmo (real name: Amir Abadi) was a DJ in the clubs XS (Frankfurt) and Warehouse (Cologne).  He contributed to both Silence I and II and had previously collaborated with Namlook on Escape, an early FAX 12" single.  The following year (1993), they would work together on three additional Escape albums.

Still, I'm not saying that I'm starting a retrospective, though.  It's just that if one were, this would be a logical starting place.