Réchauffé by Autrax

German electronic musician Harald Lapp, who trades as Autrax, might be new on the scene, but he shares much in the way of lineage with the late Pete Namlook, his fellow countryman and sound artist-in-arms. On this, his first full-length, it might well be no coincidence that he’s named a track “Alien Community” as both an homage and shout-out to Namlook’s work of the same name. Stylistically, Lapp’s catalog of noises bears much in the way of Fax-ian fruit: the aforementioned track revels in the former label’s high regard for blurp, bleep, and deep space ritual, nine post-trance minutes of sequenced mercury, acid-test spittle, and cushiony keyboard stabs. “Deep Bass 9” reasonably Faxes its own brains out as well, the vintage 707 squiggles creating instant recall for the likes of early Namlook sides from Sequential, Datacide, Coeur Atomique, and many other classic tales from the much-heralded (and greatly missed) Teutonic 90s. Anyone with even a passing interest in the kinds of analog perambulations Mr. Namlook and his band of merry knob twiddlers exorcised will be quite taken with Lapp in his Autrax guise—it’s a rearview mirror glimpse into the past that looks to harness the future.

We're here because of Pete Namlook. We were the North American distributor of FAX and decided to pay tribute to him with an 8-CD boxed set entitled Die Welt ist Klang. Since we couldn't release that box on FAX, we started Carpe Sonum.