Gas – Gas

Excellent album and worth waiting for. That classic GAS combo of drone, swirl and thudding beat. Beware though: the CD has shorter tracks than the digital from Bandcamp. I wasn't aware of that until I had the CD so now have both.

https://kompakt.fm/releases/gas_gas

Vinyl reissue forthcoming via Kompakt on 23.8.2024. Great news, as track 1 is one of the most serene and blissed-out pieces under the GAS moniker, unavailable for decades...until now.

Did some analysis and turns out the entirety of this 120+ album is made with only THREE samples/sounds total, not counting bass pads and/or beats.

First two tracks are built around this keyboard-synth sample with an airy feel (should i say gassy), which is apparent at first listen. But the main sound throughout track 4 is a VERY tiny bit from the sample used in track 3, just looped to infinity and pitched down 8 semitones. The final two tracks also are made with a common string-like sample being used at two different speeds, with a lot of echo and equalizing to it. And that's the whole thing.

Could this scarcity of sounds be the reason why Voigt seemingly wants to forget about this album? In my opinion making an album this monumental and mesmerizing with such limited resources is just another proof of how genius the man really is and how unique this musical statement keeps on being.

PD: true story, this one time i blasted this entire album at one pizza place i worked at, some girl who was there with me straight asked me if 'i believed in god' by the fifth track. With a straight face, too.

Kome on Kompakt! Please repress this vinyl? Thousands of fans and I will purchase.
💙💛💙💛

Absolutely flawless. Perfectly and expressive. Absolutely gorgeous. Simple and elegant.

After years of listening to all the GAS albums, and EPs, this first LP really stands out amongst the artist’s full Sonic cannon. To be sure, Königsforst remains my personal favorite, but this lp really holds up and plays like the blueprint in which all of Wolfgang’s later releases borrow from. In particular, there is a droning quality that is often present within GAS releases, but is of a particular melt-your-face quality on this release. There is a grit and thump that is unique to this album and for all fans of GAS, this is an album that must be added to one’s collection.

Lastly, track E is exceptionally beautiful and takes the listener on a soaring journey that is visual with eyes open or closed.

Pop music albums as radical as the first album of Wolfgang Voigt's project GAS are scarce. Comparable extremes coming to mind are Napalm Death's "Scum", the self-proclaimed "end of music as we know it" by virtue of being the fastest music ever released on a commercial CD, or Earth's "Earth 2" for being the slowest.

"GAS" is also excessively slow; simply put, it's drone music. In the first track, all your ear can latch on to is a few heavily down-tuned, backwards-played samples of Disco guitar. But actually it took me a backwards playback at 75 rpm to discover that. The resulting texture is so smooth, soothing, subdued, it can almost be felt as a physical presence in the room. And contrary to New Age musics that try to achieve that effect through big production and effects claptrap, "GAS" shines with a very moderate production, the worst thing about this being the frequent clicks as artifacts of sample editing, the best being that it will sound great on any system, at any volume, at any time of the day.

It's interesting to look at the development of GAS' sound. The debut EP on Profan contained four tracks that were very different from each other (more on that to come in a seperate review). The self-titled album takes up where the EP ended, with a very plastic-y and synthetic sound: track 1 is an enlengthened, reduced version of the EP's track 4; track 2 is basically track 1 with a beat added; etc... the whole album basically is a handful ideas stretched out to a whopping (actually, soothing) 77 minutes. All Later GAS albums (I followed through until 2000's "Pop") sounded very different from it, mostly deploying samples from classical music like Schoenberg and Wagner, so "GAS" remains unique and unchallenged to this day.

The album is usually put into the "ambient" drawer. I don't know... Okay, the term "ambient" itself has become pretty vague by today, but the synthetic, monotonous "GAS" is the complete opposite of the sountrack-ish and, well, ambient quality of classics like Eno's "Music For Airports". It's far more abstract (not structurally, but as in "the contrary of concrete, recognizable, image-evoking sound material") and, forgive me, musical than that. When I last read an interview with Wolfgang Voigt in 1999, he insisted that all of his music would be seen simply as pop, and as strange and radical as "GAS" may appear, Voigt's claim makes sense.