Gas

Miller Theatre (at Columbia University); Fri 29

Photographs: Courtesy of Kompact

It’s no great surprise that an artist who’s spent decades exploring ambience and repetition doesn’t get out much. Yet thankfully for New Yorkers, Wolfgang Voigt, cofounder of Germany’s influential Kompact record label, apparently intends to reverse this condition: Gas, his legendary electronic project, is finally slated to make its long-overdue U.S. debut. Last year, Voigt’s Cologne imprint issued Nah und Fern, a box set compiling the Gas canon; this week’s performance arrives amid a major reappraisal of his unique body of work.

Armed with computers and Petra Hollenbach’s projections, Voigt is equipped to work the crowd into guided dance-floor meditations. Attendees can expect a sensation akin to watching a Super-8 video of a snowy rave around a bonfire in the 19th-century German countryside.

The show is curated by Ronen Givony for his Wordless Music Series, known for its half-electronic, half-classical ethos. “When I discovered the Gas records, I found everything about them distinctive,” Givony explains. “German classical music is very important to Voigt. A lot of [his] original samples were transfigured from Brahms and Wagner. It makes total sense for the context of Wordless Music.”

Pointedly, Gas’s first show took place in Leipzig: Bach’s home during his final decades. Mix that with Voigt’s extensive career in Cologne—the base for electronic pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and countless techno innovations—and it becomes clear that the Gas experience diffuses German music history into a rich intertextual fog.—Carter Maness

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