Gas - Flashes in the Void

Voigt says of his output: “This is music with no beginning and no end”.

Wolfgang Voigt, seen walking down the street, might look like a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. But as the saying goes, “clothes don't make the man”. He's not just anyone: a champion of Nineties German electronic music, he's the man behind the seminal Kompakt, as well as a refined and eclectic artist. You'll rarely find him under the critics' spotlight for either a monstrous masterpiece or an irredeemable flop. He seems like one of those men perennially destined for the shadows, whose works go unnoticed and yet turn out to be essential.

Indeed, taking a closer look at his résumé, one discovers that Voigt, with his vaguely new romantic look, has kept himself busier than almost anyone else across numerous main and side projects throughout his artistic career. An activity that began in the very early Nineties. Electronic music, at the time, was pulsing with life as never before, with countless exchanges and collaborations taking place between different musical souls, encounters that encouraged the emergence of new sounds, new blends between apparently opposite genres that would end up merging into a single magma.

And this is precisely where Voigt sets out from. Working his way free of the thousands of productions of the era, and of what Berlin and Germany represented when it came to synthetic sounds, the forty-year-old German managed to bring out a new soul in electronic music. A soul made of sweet techno pulsations, imperceptibly flowing drones, sound beams chiseled in a slow but constant motion. Ambient, techno, avant-garde and experimentalism are the pillars on which Voigt's music rests in his most fascinating and mysterious project: Gas.

In 1996, after a long gestation, his debut work, simply titled Gas, came out on Mille Plateaux. Across more than an hour spanning six untitled tracks, Voigt immediately shows what he's made of. Long compositions (the shortest runs past six minutes) that sketch out cosmic sounds. What comes through from the very first notes is the plastic effect taken on by the notes, heightened by the perennial, at times imperceptible, flow of beats that seem to chase each other throughout the whole work. If the first track — a drone veiled by a thick curtain of fog — reveals Gas's ambient side, the fourteen minutes of the second lay bare the essence of the work: sonic stratifications, reverberations of northern lights, a sweet yet obsessive, uninterrupted heartbeat.

After this true masterpiece of sonic hypnotism, the less vibrant side resurfaces in the notes of the third track: expanses that multiply in an endless motion, interspersed with the odd guitar arpeggio, almost in the manner of Eluvium. The feeling, though, is that Voigt, however masterful even on the less driven tracks, gives his best when it's time to hit the accelerator. And so, in the eleven minutes of "Gas #4", we once again hear beguiling beats sustaining a mellifluous melody that flows slowly, propped up by elusive glitches cutting through the air. Astral melodies, as in the best of Port-Royal, light up the fifth track in a near quarter-hour game of tug-of-war, vibrant waves ebbing and flowing, notes progressively growing more muffled, projected toward full sounds and intoxicating layers.

Voigt seems like a snake charmer, seductive melodies chasing one another in the sixth track that closes the album: a kaleidoscopic portrait of daybreak lighting the way for what, all things considered, can only be called a sublime album.

Less than a year passes, we're in 1997, and the German manipulator's new effort is already ready. The seven tracks making up the new work, for a total duration almost identical to the debut album, mark a reversal compared to the self-titled record. If one of the hallmarks of the debut was alternating ambient pièces with tracks built on an amalgam of beats and cosmic melodies as their backbone, in Zauberberg — if we exclude the final track, a little gem of drone music of transparent beauty in its morning unfolding — the overall approach is rather different. There isn't a single track that isn't underpinned by an incessant, claustrophobic nocturnal pulse. Unlike the debut, where airy melodies could be breathed in, here Voigt plunges us into an urban void, the notes grow heavy and a sense of asphyxiation grips the heart.

The second track, across its fourteen minutes, spreads out like an oil stain, advancing propped up by hammering beats, without letting even a hint of light show through. And while "Zauberberg #3" unfolds with a decidedly less dark sound, dotted with spectral reverberations, the following track, immersed in a sea of rain, shows Gas's dark side. An austere sonic minimalism chases a trembling, obsessive beat that reverberates over a few guitar notes. In the eight minutes of "Zauberberg #5" the outlines of an industrial landscape take shape, of machines in power, of black clouds showing no sign of clearing. But Voigt's music in this album seems to arrive at the sublimation of existence's dark side. The penultimate track is an immersion in a tar-black, dense sea from which escape seems impossible. But this is when Gas surprises the listener by placing a final track whose notes seem to chase rays of sunlight in the distance. Having theorized reality's dark profile, we resurface.

1999 is the year of Königsforst. In Voigt's third work, the ambient-claustrophobic ravings of the previous record disappear, making room for decidedly less oppressive pièces that open the melody up to infinite cosmic spaces, whose coordinates or horizons can never be grasped. Such is the case with the marvelous sonic swing of the second track: a few guitar arpeggios creep in among carefully chiseled sonic stratifications propped up by a soft pulse. The drones unfurl in circles across the fabulous fifteen minutes of "Königsforst #5", the harmony opening onto the horizon to reveal notes with a classical flavor, in a timeless motion. And while the final ten minutes, literally spine-tingling, breathe in the scents and colors of Nordic lands, the sinister flow of the third track brings memories back to the visions of Zauberberg.

Voigt knows how to navigate with great mastery the writing of tracks that always have something to say. There's no sound already heard, nor a note out of place. He theorizes a sound that knows no limit, letting itself be carried by the waves with cold rationality. Gas's music is cosmopolitan, speaking to and interacting with what surrounds it, it is ice and sun, day and night. Probing the remote subconscious of existence, the Teutonic author manages to paint an extremely difficult picture, yet one of such majestic clarity as to border on perfection. The animal heartbeat of the fourth track is a striking example of this: barely sketched guitar notes, dark solemnity, drones folding over one another. Once again: beauty in the service of music.

Gas's arc comes to an end with Pop. The last album of Voigt's four-album run came out in 2000, over an hour of melodies across seven tracks. On closer listen, the choice to title the new work Pop seems anything but accidental. The album features decidedly more accessible melodies, veiled in a springtime brightness. The space devoted to beats is practically reduced to zero in favor of liquid melodies, field recordings and drones that never move in a dark way, but always with a placid, tranquil motion. A true summa of the three previous records, Pop creeps into the soul like a vision of a spring dawn: the sun slowly rising, a fresh breeze at one's back, branches swaying and birds in flight. "Pop #2" sketches the splendor of the sea in the morning, continuous lapping waves wash over the listener in endless surges, repeatedly shifting direction. "Pop #3" feels like an X-ray, cerebral and solemn, which as it unfolds opens up to the cosmos. A beat with traits not so far removed from dub instead characterizes the pace of the fourth track, which lives on slow ups and downs.

The astral visions, immersed in amniotic fluid, of "Pop #5" serve as a prelude to the splendid penultimate track. Nine minutes of pure oxygen, in which gigantic waves chase one another, breaking in slow motion on the shoreline. The album closes with the fifteen minutes of "Pop #7": an ideal compendium of the works released so far, the final track worms its way into the listener irresistibly. A true gem of ambient and soft-techno, this burst of sunlight clears away the fog of the penultimate track, making the air clean and crisp.

Thus, within the brief span of four years, a dazzling arc comes to a close across more than four hours of music, released by Kompakt in 2008 in the collection Nah Und Fern. Gems of radiant beauty, the four works released between 1996 and 2000 marked an era, albeit underground.

Then, 17 years later, the surprise arrives. A new record, Narkopop (2017), for an endless loop, identical to twenty years earlier. Nuances aside, of course. But 80 minutes that fly by in a flash, not a hint of yawning, nothing of the sort. The usual journey, whether into more abstract, ambient territories, or into others where the beat's backbone is (almost) incessant. It seems to run on autopilot, whether opening the beat up to endless forays, or shaping drones in the shade of branches.

It's the same old Gas, retaining a very strong naturalistic imprint. It's "Pop" and "Zauberberg" (as well as the self-titled album and "Königsforst") rolled into one; the room left for the darkest, sickest ambient is limited but perhaps subtler, the layers brush against one another, you can smell the moss, nature reconnecting with itself.

The majestic, moving seven minutes of "Narkopop 5", amid clangs, nearly strangled trumpets and a thunderous pace, stage pristine worlds and uncontaminated valleys. No less celestial is "Narkopop 10", an endless ride (the ideal counterpoint to "Pop 7") that in its final minutes levitates skyward. And, in between, the sinister mists reinforced by a velvety 4/4 on the second track, the dream-ambient of "Narkopop 3", the beating of wings, the shower of microbeats and synths now sinister, now celestial, of the others.

The perennial sense of being in a state of abandonment, of REM-sleep listening, of narcolepsy. Gas has been doing this for over twenty years now, and the 17-year hiatus doesn't show at all. After all, sometimes standing absolutely still isn't such a bad thing. As his loops themselves suggest, time is pure fantasy.

Rausch (2018) is once again an impassable sonic path, artificially divided into seven parts. It's a listening experience to be lived without interruption, like a dark, repetitive trail caught between hypnosis and magic, between techno and a journey through the Black Forest, between "intoxication" (the translation of the German word Rausch) – understood above all as a feverish ecstasy of losing oneself in magical nature – and tireless, martial rhythms.

This is a Wolfgang Voigt who keeps quoting himself, basking in his own greatness, almost becoming a self-satisfied epigone of himself; yet the repetition of his formula doesn't hide just how vast his ability is – in certain stretches of the album – to build towering sonic layers with obsessive, restless beats that confirm how Gas is capable of giving his best in moments of greatest grandeur. This is achieved, for instance, in the forced march of "Rausch 2" with its light cymbal percussion, or in the tribal rhythms of "Rausch 5" with hints of trumpets dissolving into nothingness. The wall of sound becomes almost oppressive on "Rausch 4", the shortest track yet paradoxically the most powerful and unsettling. That sense of requiem, often present in Voigt's music, is more perceptible here than ever; almost an existential urgency clearly audible in the seven minutes of "Rausch 6" or in the strings of the closing "Rausch 7".

Perhaps repetition is the limit of Rausch, which in the end comes across almost as a well-crafted appendix to the previous Narkopop. Certainly as meticulous as few others in its sonic detail – a quality that makes it best heard on headphones – and consistent with the idea of music "with neither beginning nor end," Voigt seems to have undercut his own good ideas with excessive length (60 minutes); a tighter edit would probably have benefited the project.

Contribution by Valerio D’Onofrio (“Rausch”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google