GAS and other Wolfgang Voigt projects

[The Mollusk]

First off, GAS is fucking amazing isn't it? That trilogy of earlier albums - Zauberberg, Königsforst, Pop - is some of the best ambient music I've heard. Bloke takes a bunch of acid in a forest and makes music based themed around his experiences, and it sounds exactly like that. Hallucinatory, serene, melancholic, awe inspiring and sometimes disorienting and ominous. Track 2 on Pop follows so much familiar ground in its blissful reverie but then there are two bits towards the end where the loops double back on themselves and it feels like suddenly being starkly aware of how lost you are after walking aimlessly and peacefully for so long. That sudden pervading sense of anxiety when you've been blocking out reality for a while but it creeps in round the corner of your mind is hugely relatable to me. I was listening to it whilst lying on my acupressure mat last night (highly recommended for back pain and just generally as a way to release endorphins and feel relaxed) and I was so overcome with emotion at this point I felt like crying. Voigt has such an incredible feel for his surroundings - physical or otherwise - that translates remarkably through this music.

So, where else to start with his immense discography under numerous aliases? He's a pioneer of minimal techno which is a genre I've never paid much attention to and I'd love to check out some key releases.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

burger/ink las vegas

[dontpaintyourteeth]

not really a huge fan of his but that's a great album

a literal german from literal berlin recommended it to me on last fm back in the day so it must be good

[chutnut]

Gas is absolutely amazing but I haven't really enjoyed most of the other stuff I've heard by him. He's one of the owners of the Kompakt label so I always associate him with that cheesy style of minimal techno although he's done plenty of different sounding stuff. this is good:

Also the Sog project is pretty funny
https://www.discogs.com/release/3656858-Sog-For-The-Love-Of-God
Can't find any of it on youtube but its basically just a 4x4 kick drum for an hour

[buttgammon]

Pop is my all-time favourite of his, it's such a beautiful album.

I really like the Voigt and Voigt stuff he's done with his brother over the years - particularly an early track called Vision 02, which appears on some of the Kompakt compilations (most of which are pockmarked with Voigt aliases).

[lankyguy95]

burger/ink las vegas

Seconded. Elvism is the loveliest thing.

[jobotic]

Yeah Pop is lovely.

I also have a great track by him as "All" on Pop Ambient 2002.

I think there may have been a mistake on Discogs - fairly sure that it's a different "All" that appear on this.

https://www.discogs.com/release/13371520-Various-Pub-Party


Also on Kompakt is Because Before by Ulf Lohmann - I'd recommend that.

[Vodkafone]

Love those early albums. They're like being off your guts at 4 am in the chill out room at a big club and being able to hear the beats coming from the main room, but you're also somehow in bed.

[buttgammon]

Yeah Pop is lovely.

I also have a great track by him as "All" on Pop Ambient 2002.

I think there may have been a mistake on Discogs - fairly sure that it's a different "All" that appear on this.

https://www.discogs.com/release/13371520-Various-Pub-Party


Also on Kompakt is Because Before by Ulf Lohmann - I'd recommend that.

Nothing would surprise me about him but being on the seventies pub album sounds like a bridge too far.

Some of the glitchier All stuff is great - one or two tracks even appeared on those seminal Mille Plateaux Clicks and Cuts compilations.

[Key]

It's pretty safe to say that GAS is his best alias. I even loved the comeback records which didn't get very highly rated - they were only slight variations of what came before, but the original idea is so good imo it can sustain this kind of rinsing.

The Rückverzauberung stuff under his given name is probably my second favorite project. Its usually beatless ambient stuff but theres a wide range in styles. It started off as single tracks on the Pop Ambient comps but then branched off into its own thing. #9 & #10 are quite similar to GAS with a kind of nocturnal, pastoral vibe while #6 is a Penderecki-eque choral nightmare.

The Burger/Ink stuff is really nice, the closest he gets to the Basic Channel dub techno sound. The Mike Ink stuff is seminal 90s Warp techno, and he has a host of more straight up techno aliases on his own label worth a listen, the Freiland 12"s being a standout.

Theres a whole load of other crazy shit if you wanna dig deeper, 'Freiland Klaviermusic' is a Cornelius Cardew style atonal piano freakout. Theres a techno album where the source material is 100% cutups from Franz Kafka audiobooks - theres many laudable but ultimately failed attempts to try and cross polinate techno with polka/oom-pah.

[The Mollusk]

burger/ink las vegas

Enjoying this a lot! Twelve Miles High is ace.

[The Mollusk]

This dude is the master of the bassline, such deep and immersive tones in his music

[shoulders]

GAS - Pop didn't do that much for me. Like an enormous meringue, some of it was tasty but a lot was cloying and tedious.

Kompakt - Pop Ambient is a great series and I would say far more worth listening to.

[The Mollusk]

Kompakt - Pop Ambient is a great series and I would say far more worth listening to.

I've got the 2010 comp ready to check out tomorrow, sounds great.

This dude's music has been soaking into me a lot today. Became totally engrossed in the off-kilter minimal beats of the M:I:5 album Maßstab 1:5, which becomes more narcotic the more I listen to it until the 17 minute closing track totally envelopes me. Re-potting some house plants in the kitchen earlier and ended up standing still staring at a nondescript area of the room for a while before realising I'd stopped functioning. Fantastic.

[Enzo]

I really liked his Kafkatrax although it's been years since I've listened to it.

Pop really is fantastic though. Great soundtrack for dissociation.

Adore the track Frieden from the Total 12 Kompakt comp. bit more in your face than the GAS stuff, but I especially love when the main melody is reversed. Good stuff.

[The Mollusk]

Loving Rückverzauberung 9: Musik für Kulturinstitutionen at the moment. 50 mins of (synthetic?) horns in layered patterns and soaked in delay that very gradually shift in soft rhythmic pulses across the whole thing. It's one big thing but separated into 5 movements like Music for 18 Musicians. Deeply hypnotic and relaxing.

Rückverzauberung 10: Nationalpark is kinda similar in that it's one hour-long song of reverberated waves of haunting neo-classical although lacking the rhythmic throb of the above and more ambient with those occasional Gas flourishes of unease among the soothing drones. It didn't have nearly as much an impact on me though, found it comparatively lacking in substance and even a bit boring.

[hermitical]

Have you spotted these two on Bandcamp?

[The Mollusk]

Have you spotted these two on Bandcamp?

Are you asking if that's where I listened to them? If so, nah! Pinched them on Soulseek.

[The F Bomb]

This is one of my favourites, from his Studio 1 moniker. It's very stripped down dub techno, but with lots of subtle syncopated shifts. The arrangement has such a tremendous energy, for me, the kick and snare are just there as extra punctuation.

It's like a more sprightly take on Basic Channel's legendary Phylyps Trak II/II. (Linked if by some quirk of fate you've never heard it.)

It's obviously not as heady or transportative as Basic Channel, but it never fails to make me grin.

The whole Studio 1 compilation is worth a listen, lots of other great pieces and some where the formula feels thin. There's also an interesting Variationen take on it by Thomas Brinkmann, which essentially predates the 'slowed and reverbed' trope by a couple of decades. There's more to it than than that and the process itself is vaguely interesting but it's a great way to explore the intricacies of Studio 1 and Wolfgang Voigt's production.

[jobotic]

That's great. Never heard the Studio 1 stuff before. Nice one.