GAS - Narkopop
Pitchfork 88
In the year 2000, Wolfgang Voigt released Pop, his fourth album of ambient music under the name GAS. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear that there needed to be a fifth. It’s not that Voigt had run out of ideas. The three prior GAS full-lengths Voigt had released since 1996 had focused mostly on drone-laden synth washes, dark and swirling samples of Wagnerian strings, and a deep, insistent, and often disconcertingly fast 4/4 kick drum that did nothing to signify “relaxation.” Pop’s sonic universe—a natural world rendered in an eerily synthetic manner—was actually the outlier of his discography at that time, a sharp left turn after four years of steady, incremental progression. The fact that GAS seemingly ended on such a strong and radically different note lent the record the feeling of punctuation: It seemed as though there could be nothing else on the other side of the Pop’s hard stop.
But here we are 17 years later, and Voigt has returned with a fifth GAS full-length, Narkopop. Like so many musical projects that seem to end on a high note, GAS has only grown in stature in its absence. In the years since Pop, GAS has become an ambient touchstone, and Voigt has become one of a small handful modern artists—see Fennesz, Oval, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker—who put a personal stamp on the music as distinctive as Brian Eno’s. Though Voigt has kept busy releasing various solo and collaborative projects and running Kompakt (the label he owns with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape), GAS never quite left the frame, and Voigt seems to recognize its iconic stature, given the release of two box sets and a the well-received GAS shows he’s put on over the last decade. Perhaps there was, after all, a sense of unfinished business. Narkopop doesn’t precisely pick up where things left off (there’s nothing here that sounds like Pop’s alternative Earth), but it does add another chapter to the story, with deeper, richer, and more luxurious sound that feel appropriate given GAS’ place in the ambient firmament.
Narkopop’s textural range approaches 1998’s Königsforst, as it mixes pure drone, symphonic grandeur, and industrial clang, but it goes even further into the realm of evocative film music. Angelo Badalamenti’s score to Mulholland Drive seems to be a particular inspiration, and the tense crawl of Narkopop’s opening track (as with almost all GAS tracks, these are distinguished only with numbers) almost has to be a direct reference to the film’s main theme. Narkopop is also the most “live”-feeling of the GAS records—not because it seems like the result of improvisation but because, no matter where you are hearing it, you imagine these tracks playing in a vast room, or maybe an airplane hangar. Cavernous reverb is a constant, and the tracks are layered with the kind of hiss and electronic noise that bring to mind the frighteningly high noise floor of a massive sound system waiting to explode. Where the kick drum appears, it becomes a tool for sketching out the dimensions of the imaginary space. “Narkopop 5”’s rhythm is alarmingly martial, like it comes from a sinister marching band circling around the interior edges of a warehouse. “Narkopop 9” adds an extra octave to the lower end, giving the anchor beat a deep physicality to contrast with the deeply romantic string melodies. And sometimes the space is inverted, but it takes you on a trip just the same: The bass pulse on the more muted “Narkopop 2” brings to mind not walls but a rib cage, suggesting an interior journey.
There’s no major reinvention here, but the sheer scale of Narkopop feels bigger and richer than what came before. GAS’ origins can be traced to the raw dub techno coming out of Berlin in the early and mid-’90s. Basic Channel were taking dance music and stripping it bare, to where a bass drum and a bit of echo might be all that’s left of a given track. Voigt rebuilt dub techno from the ground up, filling in the empty spaces with drones and classical touches but keeping the tension of the pulse. If early GAS felt homemade, a snapshot of where bedroom production was in the ’90s, this record sounds expensive, the product of someone with the time and resources to get every sound just so. It takes the basic grainy GAS approach and blows up the crude raw materials to a sparkling 70mm, an epic ready to be projected onto the wall of a canyon.
But despite its grand gestures, the great triumph of GAS is that the feelings the project evokes are hard to name. The music of Narkopop can be meditative, but there’s always something unsettling lingering beneath—it’s about shaking something loose rather than easing us into serenity. The arrangements imply “drama,” but it’s all of a nonspecific type, a blurry scene those details are just out of reach. So while a given track might feel ominous or uplifting, it always stops just short of manipulation. The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music’s most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener.
Fri Apr 21 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 80
GAS
Narkopop
[Kompakt; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
You can still hear the sounds of the city weaving their way through the trees out here. It’s strange; since moving, I actually find myself craving that noise, nodding my head more to that pulsing beat from afar than I ever did when we would all go out on the town, stumbling from club to club as if any kind of stillness would be the death of us. I couldn’t be a part of that then, but still, how comforting is it to hear a train going by at night? I feel closer to that steel than I ever could to these trees.
Not much has changed with GAS in the years since Wolfgang Voigt put the project to rest. That’s essentially by design; did GAS ever change much to begin with? The four albums Voigt released under the moniker between 1996 and 2000 existed in a space beholden to music while strangely existing outside of it. It was deeply unsettling to listen to, layers upon layers of melodic and tonal seepage that still somehow accumulated into a calming whole, the kind of sonic sculpting that reaches beyond any concept of “techno” or “ambient” music and into a realm wholly its own. Voigt’s 4/4 thump was a reinvention of rhythm, and to come back to his specific sense of sound in the present day is to confront the history of progressive electronic music over the past several decades — how far have we come, and what have we left behind?
Narkopop is unconcerned with any of this conjecture. It is, quite simply, another slab of subtly overpowering spaciousness and mood, grounded in sparse beats that feel wrong to actually move to. You could say it sounds like music from an earlier time, but then how exactly did it fit into the picture at all? Even in the modern day, when the proliferance of drone and ambient musics have led to an overflow of basement synth lords, Narkopop is a heavy reminder of what listening to a sustained chord for more than 10 minutes at a time can actually do to your body. Voigt’s sense of composition is unwieldy, and the layers of hiss in these untitled tracks seem to contain an infinite spring of shifting surfaces and unwritten songs that cascade upon and into themselves even as they remain firm and static. Delineating these tracks is like trying to discern the differences between pine trees in a never-ending forest, but suffice it to say there are moments of insatiable dread (“Narkopop 1”), angelic purity (“Narkopop 7”), and scenic transformation and evolution (“Narkopop 2”). The cumulative effect of Narkopop is as powerful and subliminal as anything Voigt has done, but having a fresh perspective on music this ageless is a rare opportunity.
Narkopop by GAS
We could say that, with GAS, Voigt pioneered a new form of ambient music that suffused itself with the incorporeal rhythms of the club, but the club feels like a distant memory when listening to this music. It’s all about the wilderness, the vegetation and the weeds, and the interplay of cold machinery upon those perceptions. Narkopop subsumes not only in the sonic sense that it is an overwhelming, endless presence of sound, but also in the sense of subsumption architecture, a theory in robotics that prioritizes the sensory ability of A.I. to react in real-world circumstances over following strict, symbolic representations of their environment. The music of GAS doesn’t exactly emulate or attempt to project a proper image of nature as much as it seeks to unearth the tactile qualities of existing within it. Like raw data, it churns out uncharacterizable masses of noise that can scan as foreboding, gentle, or both at once, tranquil and feral in a shifting natural state. It’s not an idealization of nature, rather it’s remarkably nonjudgmental toward whether this frame of mind is “good” or “bad.” It merely embodies its qualities honestly, its mysterious low thump speaking to an inherent rhythm imprinted within us since before we were even born.
It’s refreshing in an era that loves to mythologize and package our legends to experience something as resistant to shape as GAS. Without making any grand, lofty statements, Narkopop lets its presence become felt nonetheless, mining the same fascinating textures that made the project seemingly eternal (and internal) to begin with. Voigt’s ecosystem is entirely his, both darker and lighter than the work of so many of his contemporaries, and part of the joy of GAS is how he is able to make the project feel as if it exists outside of any concept of the artist or the trajectory. The M.O. is so resolute, the beat so constant, that even after 17 years it is unimaginable to think that a new GAS album would sound like anything but this. As with the forests of Voigt’s childhood, it’s a comfort and a moment of disquiet to confront something so perpetually, hauntingly still.
I had to move back. Being out there, surrounded by the trees, walking to get the mail and being able to smell the Earth all around me, waiting to engulf me, I just couldn’t keep pretending to be okay with all of this. The morning I left, as I got into my car, I could feel something leaving my body, as if the last remnants of my being there had actually dispersed into the soil, spreading my fear and my tenderness deeper and deeper beneath the ground where they might live with the other baser senses of this world.
The Guardian 80
(Kompakt)
Last year, the storied Cologne label Kompakt released a box set of Gas’s ambient, techno-derived works: Box. With hindsight, that well-received retrospective now seems like a palate-cleanser for this first new Gas album in 17 years, from Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt, who releases under many aliases. Narkopop consists of 11 typically unnamed but numbered tracks of austere, saturated electronic polyphony. Ambient is an even more subjective genre than most, so depending on your internal state, passages like the 11-minute Narkopop 2 suggest that Voigt’s awe at the natural world might be evolving towards churchy iridescence. Alternatively, it can sound like being plunged into a dark, Dante-esque forest, with only a muted aortic throb to guide you home. Immersive, to say the least.
Continue reading... Sun Apr 23 07:00:06 GMT 2017