About

GAS is the first studio album by Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project and also the co-founder of Kompakt Records alongside Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape. He is considered one of the most influential minimal techno artists. Finally reissued in full, the 1996 debut from this ambient techno project deserves every second of its 92-minute runtime. It’s music to get lost in, meditative and mind-numbing—in the best way.

A new reissue on Kompakt lets GAS stand on its own, giving it room to breathe and sprawl. This is the first reissue of the album’s original, pre-Nah und Fern incarnation since its initial release on Mille Plateaux, and its most immediately striking quality is its sheer size. While the Nah und Fern version runs a little over an hour, the original CD version nearly maxed out the format’s capacity. The 3xLP runs a whopping 92 minutes, its six tracks averaging a hair past 15 minutes apiece, each one stretching comfortably across an entire side of an LP. (The digital download also features all six tracks in their full-length versions.) Voigt might see GAS as a test run for later brilliance, but it’s hard to argue it’s a minor work when in scale alone it so thoroughly dwarfs its kin—a Jupiter among Earths.

There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up.

But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions. — (via Bandcamp) 

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Label: Kompakt
Format: 3 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue
Country: Germany
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 1996
Genre: Electronic
Style: Abstract, Ambient, Minimal

File under: Ambient / Experimental / IDM
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