Pete Namlook and Robert Görl – Perfect Body (excerpt)

Alboy’s posting of a happy hardcore tune earlier this week got me thinking about whether I could ever be said to have enjoyed a hardcore tune. And the answer is… probably not.

Having said that, there have been interesting things done at the interface between hardcore and other genres.

Pete Namlook’s 1996 Elektro collaboration with ex-DAF man Robert Görl on Fax records sports a cover with a blue circle with black dots, which according to Fax’s colour-coded schema, means it’s a cross between hardcore and ambient. A workable combination, or a dog’s dinner?

IMHO, it works well. I’d say it’s more of a juxtaposition than a full fusion… sections of hardcore flowing into sections of ambient and vice-versa. But it certainly offers something different and a welcome change from the strict pigeonholing of Fax as an ‘ambient’ label.

Sadly, the experiment was not repeated, as 1997’s Elektro 2 was a more or less all-ambient affair. Perhaps the punters just couldn’t take it.

Like all Fax releases this was a limited edition (2000 copies I believe), although it’s not one of the most sought after CDs on the label so is available second-hand at reasonable prices.

Also, most of the Fax catalogue is now available through iTunes Plus – which means tracks are at 256kb/s (i.e. listenable quality, rather than crappy 128) and also you can convert the files to MP3 (if you want to play them on something other than an iPod. Which I do).

I only wish there was more of this kind of cross-genre work going on in electronic music, although it might be hard to hear about it if there was – with so many internet radio stations sticking to just one sub-sub-category of music, it’s hard for crossover to get a look-in much of the time. Oh how I miss the John Peel show – although Radio 3’s Late Junction sometimes throws up a wild card.

• buy it :: at iTunes Plus
• other reviews :: on the Fax reviews website www.2350.org

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