GAS

Since 1997’s Zauberberg, the ambient techno albums under Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS alias have formed an aesthetically complete unit held together by psychedelically blurred forest artwork and a deep-rooted awe of the universe’s terrifying vastness. Yet the Cologne producer seemed to have trouble reconciling that opus with the project’s self-titled 1996 debut. The Nah und Fern comp, released in 2008, swapped out two of the debut album’s tracks for new ones more of a piece with the later records; 2016’s Box set omitted the 1996 LP entirely. Voigt seems to think of it as an outlier in the GAS catalog, which in a few crucial respects it is. The cover is an indistinct yellow blotch reminiscent of Bathory’s Gula Geten, and the soundscape is more given to billowing walls of shoegaze than the ghostly vinyl crackle he introduced on Zauberberg.

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.

Many of the hallmarks of the GAS project are already here, not least the shimmering backwards guitar that courses through 1998’s sad, autumnal Königsforst and which makes its first appearance on “GAS 2” as it endlessly circles a major-chord resolution. Voigt’s trademark kick drum thumps as forebodingly as ever, accompanied by a hi-hat that would largely disappear from the later recordings. And like Zauberberg, it begins and ends with beatless drifts before the kick arrives to ferry us deeper into the album.

What really sets it apart from the later GAS albums is that the forest imagery has not yet developed. Voigt drew the inspiration for the later albums from a complex and personal tangle of associations, centered on his youthful acid trips in Germany’s Königsforst and a desire to tie the “deep soul of German techno” to some even deeper truth contained within the land itself. On Zauberberg, the vinyl crackles reach out of the mix like grasping branches, while stirring orchestral samples sourced from German Romantic music convey deep unease. It’s music of the earth, flecked by dirt and decayed by time.

Suffused in hiss and wind-tunnel noise, GAS more plainly suggests the state of matter implied in the project name, less akin to the vinyl séances of Philip Jeck and Leyland Kirby than the primordial ambient psych that was then being made across the Atlantic by Kranky artists Bowery Electric and Windy & Carl. A precedent can be heard on Voigt’s excellent earlier 1996 release Las Vegas, recorded with Jörg Burger as Burger/Ink. That album’s frequent references to Roxy Music suggested an abstraction of the group’s Avalon-era suavity, which may have been why Matador picked it up as the American indie label’s inaugural electronic release in 1998. GAS is closer to that album’s gauzy sound than to the later GAS recordings’ classical grandeur. It’s just a shade more rock than the others.

GAS has a less distinct emotional tenor than the later albums, which reflect different phases of Voigt’s youthful psychedelic experiences—the prickly paranoia of Zauberberg, the comedown melancholy of Königsforst, the pure-trip headscapes of 2000’s Pop. GAS is neutral, kind of fuzzy, more evocative of a dream state than the zoomed-in reflections that happen on LSD. It’s the subtlest GAS album, allowing the listener to create their own associations without any mythology, context, or visual aids.

GAS makes a stronger impression the longer it’s allowed to run. This is music to get lost in, so more is better. In its full 92-minute version, it begins to take on some of the same meditative, mind-numbing qualities as La Monte Young or Charlemagne Palestine’s drones—it’s psychedelic through sensory deprivation rather than sensory overload.

The two tracks not on Nah und Fern are “GAS 1” and “GAS 3,” which Voigt replaced with dusky orchestral miasmas drawn from the same aesthetic palette as Königsforst. They’re nothing to scoff at—“GAS 1” bellows and roars like a tornado trapped inside a jewel case, while “GAS 3” loops a lustrous snatch of organ that disappears in and out of patches of silence—but it’s not difficult to make out the click where the loops end, and they rely on incessant repetition rather than the freeform drift of Zauberberg’s samples.

GAS may be fated to be one of those classic albums with no definitive version, but this new reissue makes it more clear than ever that it’s a great (if transitional) album. Rather than approaching it in the context of the music Voigt would make later, it’s more rewarding to approach it from the other side of the timeline and see it as the moment Voigt’s romantic, idiosyncratic, deeply personal vision found its grandest expression yet.