GAS - BOX

Pitchfork 95

Earlier this summer, a story began to circulate about “Shinrin-yoku,” a coinage created by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in the early ‘80s that basically translates as “forest bathing.” It’s not hiking or trail exploring per se (nor is it, as the name might suggest, stripping naked and bathing in a pile of leaves), so much as it is a meditation that provide its bathers “an opportunity to slow down, appreciate things that can only be seen or heard when one is moving slowly,” as one guide put it. He expects it to be a trend not unlike yoga in the future. Naturally, the documentation is sparse on the health benefits of “forest bathing,” though researchers have focused on the phytoncides given off by the plants, the so-called “aroma of the forest.”

The emergence of “Shinrin-yoku” dovetails nicely with the most recent reissues of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. It, too, draws on the image of the forest and the density of its landscape, perhaps even drawing its name from the vaporous, relaxing properties of said “aroma.”One of many of Voigt’s production aliases, GAS, ran for five years in total, producing four full-lengths and a handful of singles, before coming to an end in 2000 with Pop. At that point in time in the new century, there were dozens of projects that could be traced back to Voigt’s industrious, multifaceted genius—from the maniacal, Pantone minimal techno of Studio 1 to the gateway drug of Burger/Ink’s Las Vegas (one of the earliest German techno albums to see domestic release in the US)– but the vagaries of Voigt’s GAS project were hard to pin down. The intent of GAS—as Voigt stated in an interview from that time—consisted of seeming contradictions: “The aim is always pop and to bring the German forest to the disco.” Or to take the club into the forest. That synergy—between the natural and electronic, the ancient and modern, the metered and the untamed, the infinite and the temporal—came together and then disappeared.

While nearly impossible to compile a linear chronology for his discography—which includes more than 160 albums and 40 aliases—in the intervening years since these pivotal albums were released, their influence has overshadowed his own prodigal body of work. So while the four original GAS records were boxed and compiled merely eight years ago, Nah Und Fern infuriated many fans in that each album was reduced to an edit on a single side of vinyl, cutting hours of music into just one hour. And so now we are being given the simply and monolithically titled Box: a deluxe set featuring ten pieces of vinyl (each album is now spread across three sides, with another piece containing his 1999 12,” “Oktember”), an art book of Voigt’s manipulated forest photos, as well as four CDs.

Box presents Voigt’s vision in its most momentous physical document to date and is a fitting monument. But it also looks back and edits the history in such a manner that brings to mind fellow countrymen Kraftwerk, who disavowed their first three albums they made before hitting upon the technological themes of Autobahn. Box also functions similarly to William Basinski’s massive 9-LP box set from 2012, arranging his archive of crumbling tape loops in a post-9/11 world as The Disintegration Loops, giving bookends and a coherent narrative to a project that during its creation and lifespan did not always bear one.

Originally, GAS was but one of Voigt’s innumerable pseudonyms, first arising in 1995 as a remix of his own sampledelic cover of T. Rex’s “Hot Love.” GAS may have ultimately been a defining quality of the moniker but it’s easy it also easy to hear in it an homage to T. Rex’s own languid “Life’s a Gas” and Voigt’s beloved glam rock. When he spun off GAS with its own 12”, it was decidedly more ambient, though there were bits of glam and disco still deeply embedded in the productions.

That history is elided completely here. As Box now posits, GAS begins two years on with 1997’s Zauberberg. It’s the first instance of Voigt presenting GAS as a unified sound and vision. There’s a blurred photo of black trees bathed in a demonic red light on the cover, as if a forest fire blazes just out of frame, and the music itself reveals—and revels in—a far more somber tone. The glitter of glam is replaced with soot, as Voigt ventures further back in time, sampling and looping late 19^th century-early 20^th century composers like Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg. Not that you can quite make out the motifs, as he slows such works until they become dirges, the crackle of the original vinyl casting off a campfire-like warmth, putting the techno producer on ground similar to that of experimental turntable manipulator Philip Jeck.

The opening minutes of Zauberberg’s first track drifts through an indeterminate number of orchestral loops before dissolving into mist. They drift between drone and slowed melody, focal point and blur, foreground and background, sound and decay. That approach remained intact throughout GAS’ duration. As Philip Sherburne put it eight years ago, reviewing a rare live performance from GAS: “The point of GAS isn’t the moment or the riff; it’s the totality. I’d be unable to tell you the title of a given GAS track, or even the record.”

Voigt had a lot of different approaches, so many that he had to keep switching aliases to contain them. For this particular project, Voigt only has one pitch, but it’s a doozy. His narcotic way with these loops, his ability to shift them in space, to slow them down even as the pulse beneath them intensifies, to ever-so-carefully alter the repetition so that it mystifies rather than lulls, remains unmatched. He muffles his telltale kick drum so that rather than shake a club's walls, it now seems to emanate from twelve feet under the forest floor. It’s as much a haunted memory of these nearly century-old classical recordings as it is a vague impression of last night's endless party, and as such GAS exists in a purgatorial state between the two.

Despite spending nearly two decades with the albums, I’d be hard-pressed to distinguish the twenty-four tracks here. Mostly, the tints on each cover suggest the moods within. Zauberberg remains the most menacing, suggestive of being submerged in a lake or lost in the darkest hours of night. The next year, Königsforst—while still dark—suggests more glints of light. The amber glow on the cover is conveyed by the harps that plink across “II” and the majestic brass growling on “V.” Taking its title from the woods that Voigt himself grew up in, dosing on LSD as a teen and wandering amid the trees, Königsforst reconfigures Voigt’s memories as Brothers Grimm fairytale, seeing nature as an enchanted landscape.

Pop ranges the farthest of the GAS albums, it’s opening moments warm and gurgling. Elsewhere, the swells are reminiscent of New Age music, which at the time was still widely scorned. The very next year, the chiming bells that bounce around on “IV” would become the foundation of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient sound. (In a strange twist, the A-side of the original “Oktember” single is replaced here with “Tal 90,” a track credited to Tal and released on the second Pop Ambient comp, by far the gentlest GAS track on the set and an outlier in its use of guitar as its foundation.) By the time that telltale darkness returns for the last fifteen minutes of Pop, the project feels like a riddle closing in on itself, resolving on a note that’s both ominous and transcendent at once.

Box both cements Voigt’s legacy yet it also threatens to overshadow it, collecting and solidifying a haunting body of work that echoes not just through techno, but all music as the 20^th century came to its end. No other project of Voigt’s created quite as much of an obsession amongst its listeners. It’s possible to hear Voigt move through post-rock, modern classical, noise and electronic: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Max Richter, Eluvium, Tim Hecker, Andy Stott, Sunn O))), the Orb (at least in the 21^st century), the Caretaker, Jóhan Jóhannsson, the Field, most entrants in the annual Pop Ambient series, they are just a few of the modern music makers who imbibed these albums and realized their own work.

Last year, Dr. Christopher Dooks published a paper/sound piece entitled “Lessons Learned in the Königsforst,” wherein the interdisciplinary artist trekked to the forest outside of Cologne, obsessed by the album that he’s used for years as a sleep aid, an album that “taps into something potentially universal to aid stress reduction, almost as a medication.” He goes on to compare Königsforst to the sound of hearing your mother’s heartbeat in utero, to the Buddhist practice of a walking meditation, to coming down off of drugs and our modern “hyper-aroused” state of existence, to the album being a possible treatment for PTSD. In chatting with Voigt about it, the producer said the project was “about childhood dreams and traumatic fantasies, about (drug) paranoia and very special trippy ‘inner ear’ tinnitus adventure worlds.” It’s a suspension of time in both its exploration of extended duration, as well as in blurring the sensations that inform childhood and intoxicated adult realms.

Clocking in at over four hours, Box can still be a foreboding listen. Many might still only hear a migraine-level thump and the hiss around it, while others can behold the infinite depths of space that Voigt suggests between each beat, luxuriating in each lurch of ghostly strings. Nearly twenty years later, GAS still assaults our presumptions about electronic music. How can music that seems to be monotonous, so uneventful, also convey such beauty and clarity? Why take a slow walk through the forest when there is so much to get done on any given day?

In explaining the health benefits of “Shinrin-yoku,” one researcher suggested that it’s not the aroma of the trees that gives such bathers a sense of calm, but rather from a sense of “awe,” be it astronauts gazing down at the earth, tourists taking in the Grand Canyon, or even a young man recalling the forest from his youth. The expanse and vastness of GAS reveals as much as the listeners are willing give to them, the level of attention and perception helping to create such awe. Whether it’s your first visit or a return trip into this world, the ability to travel into each track unaccompanied by Voigt yet find your own trail is part of what makes this music resonate decades later. In this way, GAS continues to confer such medicinal, even magical, qualities upon its visitors.