HinweiseIf I was banished to a desert island and allowed a single album of music this would surely be a serious contender. Available in three forms - the original, the AW reissue and via a combination of the two Instinct compilations - this is a carefully selected and quite superb guide to much of Fax's very best releases from the mythical era that is 93 through to early 95. The reason I don't actually own it anymore is quite simple ... I subsequently went out and acquired each individual release in it's own right and I'm sure many others have done (and will do) the same. It would be pointless to review each track as they're all covered elsewhere on this site and I couldn't possibly do them all full justice here without this review becoming a gigantuan task! Virtually all of the acknowledged Fax classics put in an appearance - Tetsu's Ambient Otaku + Organic Cloud, Namlook's Air + Shades Of Orion, to name just a few - but, also and more interestingly, choice tracks from many other less renowned titles which quite frankly belie their origins. This is the irony of The Cookbook ... it will turn you on to the originals, only to find that several are greater in part than they are in whole. The best examples of this are arguably the extracts from Music For Film, The Putney, A Day In The Park and Bedroom. Each one a piece of wondrous ambience lifted from an otherwise indifferent context ... I particularly found the remainder of The Putney and MTF to be generally very boring, ADITP is far too drawn out (lacking in further ideas) and the introspective Bedroom suffers from rather poor recording quality. Most difficult must have been deciding which parts to lift from Music For Ballet and Recurring Dreams as these are both virtually the same throughout. However, in this viciously pared down form they both come off a lot, lot better. Niche artists like Victor Sol and David Reeves are well served but, I think it was a mistake to include two tracks from the Transonic series ... after all there's nothing from either of the first two releases in the 2350 Broadway series and *just one* example of Atom Heart's work but, that is to criticize an otherwise definitive sampler of Fax's golden era, crossing all three labels. Recommended

(review by Paul Milligan)