Though he's dialed back his musical output in recent years, the
influence of producer Wolfgang Voigt on contemporary techno can
hardly be overestimated. In the mid-nineties, using a dizzying and
ever-changing array of monikers (Mike Ink, Gas, Freiland,
Auftrieb, M:I:5, and dozens more), he helped lay the foundations
for Cologne's extraordinary minimal techno scene. More recently,
as the senior co-founder of the Kompakt imprint, he has been one
of the principal agents responsible for spreading the Minimal
gospel and building the label into one of the most important
electronic music imprints in the world.

Of his own voluminous projects, none has proven as enduring as an
ambitious series of ambient techno experiments that he conducted
from 1995-2000 under the pseudonym Gas. The project itself was an
expansion of Voigt's long-term fascination with the German and
Austrian musical forms of his youth - classical music (Wagner,
Webern, Berg), Schlager (a peculiarly Northern European form of
schlocky pop), oompah brass band tunes, and polkas.

The fundamental sounds of Gas are all taken from old records, but
Voigt chops, loops, reverses, and decontextualizes them almost
beyond recognition. In an interview with The Wire, Voigt explained
that his goal was to evaporate the samples of their original
meaning and context. Nevertheless, faint resonances remain -
orchestral swells and the telltale crackle and hiss of age and
decay, so that even at its most airy and beautiful, Gas is always
haunted by the aural past.

Originally released by the now defunct Mille Plateaux label, the
four Gas releases--Gas, Zauberberg, Konigsforst, and Pop--have
been long out-of-print and much sought-after. But at long last
Voigt has reissued all four Gas discs, collecting them in a box
set Nah und Fern (Near and Far) on Kompakt. In addition, a book of
Voigt's Gas-related photographs, mostly of forest thickets awash
in monochromatic color, is due out later this month (with a bonus
CD of related, pre-Gas tracks) on the Chemnitz based label and
design imprint, Raster-Noton.

The packaging for this new quadruple CD set is deluxe, but the
remastering was deliberately kept to a minimum. In a recent
interview, Voigt explained that the music itself resisted all
attempts at updating, forcing him to accept the originals in order
to preserve the project's integrity. Thus little of Gas' signature
moirй haze and luminescent glow has been lost to translation. And
the records have lost little of their transporting, hallucinogenic
power. At the outset of the first self-titled album, a wave of
sound swirls, washes over, and engulfs you in disembodied
orchestral samples. Eventually, with track two, a dull, pulsing
kick drum provides measure after measure of grounding, but also
serves to draw the listener deeper into the thick of it all.

At the heart of the Gas project are the second and third albums,
1997's Zauberberg (Magic Mountain) and 1999's Kцnigsforst (King's
Forest, named for a forest not far from Cologne, where in his
youth Voigt dropped acid and contemplated its wonders). It's the
atmosphere of the forest, the dappled and disorienting interplay
between light and shadow of a walk in the woods that Voigt aims to
evoke; an insistent undercurrent of unease and disquiet runs
throughout both of these magisterial records.

With the final album, 2000's Pop, the mood lightens, as does the
sound palette. It's akin to stepping into bright sunlight, with
high-contrast colors replacing shaded hues. An effervescent,
shimmering album, Pop’s beneficent influence ripples beneath the
surface of some strains of contemporary techno, such as the
glistening post-disco of Sweden's Axel Willner, aka The Field.
But, ironically, with Gas, which is truly one of techno’s towering
achievements, the focus is not on the sublime pleasures of the
dance floor, but in the tangled, gloriously disorienting pleasures
within.