Product Description

Techno auteur Wolfgang Voigt has, since the early-`90s, taken a circumscribed route toward musical invention. Working under an array of pseudonyms (Mike Ink, Studio 1, M:I:5, and more), each handle explores one particular wrinkle within the infinite variations afforded by techno's four-on-the-floorrhythms. In true minimalist fashion, Voigt has made a virtue of austerity; stripping away layers of excess to reveal a hidden microcosm of music found within desiccated thumps, clicks, and whirs. In difference to those projects' near monomaniacal devotion to reductionism, Voigt's Gas alias takes anairy path toward the luxuriant, distended surfaces of ambient drone. NAH UND FERN is a career-marking recap of all fourout-of-print Gas albums from 1996 to 2000, here memorialized as a deluxe box-set edition.
Whereas most ambient projects serve as mere vehicles for quasi-New Age escapism--a tendency that can only be ascribed to a kind of ideological disengagement--Voigt makes explicit the post-modern, sample-based re-contextualization at play on NAH UND FERN. Using snippets of German and Austrian modernist classical composers, the source materials are truncated and looped beyond recognition, leaving faint vestiges of their orchestral origins. Buried under crackling layers of hiss and static are telltale remnants of the music's Teutonic lineage--distant horn fanfareor a mournful piano-inflected mist. The four discs comprisethe four albums (all containing a handful of untitled tracks), each with a distinct thematic leaning. 1996's self-titled debut contains the most tangible reference points in post-rave dance music--a murky version of dub-techno emerging from a primordial fog. The follow up, ZAUBERBERG (1997), startsto reveal an added dimension of thematic cohesion that is continued on KONIGSFORST (1999), the critical and formal apogee of the series. For Voigt's final installment, POP (2000),he takes a decidedly different tact, away from the dark imagery of the Bavarian forest, towards the gleaming, effervescent surfaces of AVALON-era Roxy Music--an aesthetic he laterdefined through his POP AMBIENT series as label-boss for the leading German imprint, Kompakt.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled
4. Untitled
5. Untitled
6. Untitled

Disc 2:

1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled
4. Untitled
5. Untitled
6. Untitled
7. Untitled

Disc 3:

1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled
4. Untitled
5. Untitled
6. Untitled

Disc 4:

1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled
4. Untitled
5. Untitled
6. Untitled
7. Untitled

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15724 in Music
• Released on: 2008-06-02
• Number of discs: 4
• Formats: CD, Box set, Original recording remastered, Import
• Dimensions: .33 pounds

Customer Reviews

Superlative Ambient Techno
This is a remastered rerelease of Wolfgang Voigt's GAS project of the mid 90s to early 2000s - 4 cds of beautiful, masterful electronica. Voigt was one of the founders of the German techno label Kompakt. The new release is packaged in a very attractive box with the cds in printed card sleeves of fairly abstract 'nature' photos. No text except 4 complementary inserts of more nature shots. Minimal, but gorgeous, and a limited collector's item at an amazing price. Buy it buy it buy it. End.

Truly gorgeous
I lost track of ambient sometime in the mid nineties. Positive reviews and the relatively low price made me try this one out and it cannot be faulted. "Golden era" Aphex spring to mind (ie both Ambient Works albums) . Like the best Ambient it envelops your entire being when listening to it as time becomes irrelevant. I cannot now imagine living without it. Each album has a tone to it whilst all link together as an inspirational piece of work. Words fail me.... buy while you can as this will be treasured as a work of genius in years to come.

quite possibly the most beautiful music ever created
This is wonderful music - to call it ambient is to belittle it. It is full of rich texture, colour, layers of depth - epic electronica - it struck me as almost containing a universe of sound, people, and place. Almost bordering on alien, if that alien was a higher species trying to convey to us an enviroment we might inhabit. Quite simply transformative.

On the basis of this i am looking at what the Kompakt label has to offer, since this guy co-founded it.