Peter Kuhlmann studied classical guitar at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. By the late 1980s he was an in-demand live musician, sitting in with a number of the city’s jazz ensembles. According to legend, in 1990, on his way home from work one night, he stopped by the Main River, and began playing along to the water’s rushing. Upon this epiphany, and also inspired by pioneering composer, and synthesiser designer, Oskar Sala, Kuhlmann changed track, and and instead of fusion began making electronic music. Primarily trance and ambient techno. He was incredibly prolific. Releasing the results on his own label, Fax +49-69/450464. His prodigious production rate reflected his grounding in improvisation, and experimentation, and his “first take, best take” approach. He was intent, not on perfection but, capturing the moment. Kuhlmann assumed numerous aliases – Discogs lists over 20 – and success allowed him countless collaborators, including Move D, Ritchie Hawtin, Testu Inoue, Geir “Biosphere” Jennsen, Bill Laswell, Mixmaster Morris, Klaus Schulze, and Jonah Sharp. By the time of Kuhlmann’s untimely passing in 2012, FAX’s catalogue contained around 480 titles, and it’s been claimed that this has actually stopped him gaining wider recognition, because folks are overwhelmed, and don’t know where to start.

Air II: Travelling Without Moving was the second part of a series, that eventually ran to 5, and originally hit stores, on CD only, in 1994.* Silent State Recordings have now given the album a very proper vinyl pressing. It is, indeed, a journey, and intended to be experienced in a single sitting. However that doesn’t mean that parts can’t be cherrypicked. I purchased a copy for Trip IX, which is nearly ten minutes of looped sad, sombre, Spanish guitar.

The set takes its title from a sample lifted from David Lynch’s Dune, which refers to the “spice” that can fold space, and is peppered throughout the 1 hour running time. There’s also a bit of Rutger Hauer, from Blade Runner, misquoting William Blake: “Fiery the angels fell.” The record is definitely cinematic, dramatic. Each section storytelling, segueing between ambient and dancefloor trance, between the electronic and organic. Reaching for the future, while tapping into tradition, the ancient past, as it accurately evokes a vast galactic void, while dreaming of exotic alien worlds. It’s certainly a suitable soundtrack for smokers  / stoners. 

You have synthesised sighs, like monks out in orbit, and whistling solar winds, in procession with celestial choirs and slow ceremonial hand drums. Rave-y but introspective riffs mixing with tabla, and cyclical high-pitched reeds that recall the Master Musicians Of Joujouka. In places romantic Middle Eastern melodies seem to mourn a lost, leaving, lover, while in others more dystopian drones dance like dervishes to breakneck rituals, of tribal beats and dark didgeridoo growls.

Swarms of angry, action-packed arpeggios counter ghostly gamelan mists of metallic bells and gongs. Rainstick showers, temple tingsha, nocturnal rainforest emissions inhabit a haunting house. If my “poetry” ain’t enough to inspire ya, then Nuel’s terrific Trance Mutation, Sven Vath’s Accident In Paradise, and the Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia general sonic aesthetic are all relevant points of reference.

Air II: Travelling Without Moving is out now, on a pristine pressing, care of Silent State Recordings. 

To learn more there’s a great in-depth article on Peter Kuhlmann, by Joe Madden, over at redbullmusicacademy.com

NOTES

*Back in the mid-90s Dave Cawley, in FatCat Records, would recommend me FAX releases, and look at me in disbelief, like I was a relic, when I told him that I didn’t have a CD player. The only Kuhlmann cut I bought at the time was the From Within 12 that he put out with Richie Hawtin.