Gas

AMBI-DEXTROUS Voigt is responsible for some of the most thrilling ambient music produced in recent years.

It’s a tone that can heal the blackest of hearts; it’s a rhythm that can darken the lightest of souls. It’s the soundtrack to nightmares and fairy tales. It’s grand music on a microscopic scale, massive in ambition yet highly personal in practice. It’s Gas, techno artist Wolfgang Voigt’s revered ambient project, spoken about in hushed whispers by those enthralled with the hazy, gently pulsating odes that the Cologne, Germany, resident produced between 1995 and 2000. Using classical-music source material (with a bit of pop, brass-band music and kitschy schlager tossed in for good measure), which Voigt then smears with a beautiful, billowy wash of sound, it ranks with the best ambient music produced in the past few decades. We’re now in the midst of a Gas resurgence: Last year, Kompakt—the techno label run by Voigt, Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape—put out the four original albums in the Nah und Fern box set. And he’s been performing as Gas in a live setting as well, accompanied by animations derived from Wolfgang Voigt–GAS, a recently released collection of his photography. Gas has its first (and at this point, only) U.S. live date at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre on Friday 29—it’s a gig that will probably attract buzzing techno kids and bearded professor types in equal measure, and Voigt seems ready for action.

The terms hazy or amniotic often come up when people describe the sound of Gas. If it’s even possible to do so, how would you describe it in just a few words?
Gas is the vision of a sonic body between Schoenberg and Kraftwerk, between French horn and bass drum. Gas is Wagner goes glam rock, and Brothers Grimm on acid. Gas takes you on a seemingly endless march through the undergrowth—and straight into the discotheque—of an imaginary, nebulous forest. I call it narcopop.

For source material, you draw upon both classical and popular music. In doing so, are you making some kind of grand statement about that music, or is it used more as simply different colors to paint with?
Although Gas music is based on certain samples, this is only the raw material, which I need to realize my own sounds, visions and emotions. References to Schoenberg, Wagner, Berg, etc. used to be important to me, but I am not interested in those references anymore. They distract from the focus. The interesting thing about Gas is Gas, not Wagner.

Why is it that you never performed as Gas in the ’90s?
I had innumerable big ideas and visions of setting up half the German forest, including Hansel and Gretel, onstage, but I had no idea how to realize it technically. And I was not sure if anybody in the techno scene would be interested at all. After some years’ distance, I met Petra Hollenbach—a fantastic, congenial video artist based in Cologne—who knew exactly how to visualize and animate all my ideas on the sound, the images and their meaning.

What is the intended effect of that marriage of music and image?
I would say it is a cinema of the senses, a highly aestheticized music-movie. When performing live, my own presence on stage is reduced. Overall, a Gas performance is a 90-minute, nonstop visual and sound rush, a trip where the audience can and may get lost—with permission to take off and dream away.

Some Gas tracks have a vaguely ominous tone, but others are quite peaceful and dreamy. Are you trying to elicit certain moods, or is that of secondary consideration?
Beauty must hurt sometimes. But I think that I do not want to create a certain kind of mood; it’s more that it documents my inner conflict about moods. Ideally the boundaries between dark and light, heavy and light, happiness and depression will become neutralized by Gas. A kind of simultaneousness evolves—a third feeling or mood.

Heavy—but considering you’re such a serious artist, why do so many of your press photos show you with a big grin?
I believe that serious art can be made by artists whose dark soul has a friendly side. I want to sound like Wagner, and look like Madonna.

Gas performs at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre Fri 29.

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