Gas
Pop
Mille Plateaux
When a gas is released into an area, it immediately diffuses throughout. It finds its way into every nook and cranny, and if it is so inclined, drapes the air in a gossamer haze. Considering this, Wolfgang Voigt could not have conceived of a more appropriate name for this project.
This is the same Wolfgang Voigt around whom the Cologne minimal techno scene revolves. He is the owner of the Mike Ink, Studio 1, and All monikers while operating under other pseudonyms. The Gas guise is for his more accessible and hence Pop oriented music. Don’t get this confused with the Gas that recorded for the now-defunct em:t label, and which had a (somewhat) similar take on sound.
I know people who would quickly jump to categorize this as ambient, but here, the term does not fit. True, the music does set up various moods, all of them calm, but the music is far too active to be ignored. Field recordings of rainfall are muffled by pulses that swell and recede, while soft melodies waft through the air. The texture is constantly shifting in these 7 tracks, but only one of them has the beats that Gas is known for. Track 4 contains the thumping pulse that filled his prior two albums and stretches out for ten glorious minutes. On Pop, the focus is clearly on the atmosphere instead of the comfortably numbing beats. Seriously lovely.
Mille Plateaux, http://www.mille-plateaux.com/
