Pop

Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project at its most immersive and disorienting — a sound that envelops completely before the listener quite realizes submersion has occurred. The album moves as a single continuous organism rather than a collection of tracks, each piece bleeding into the next through a thick sediment of processed orchestral material, distant and indistinct as sounds heard through forest undergrowth. The source material — excerpts of classical recordings dissolved in layers of noise and drone — surfaces and sinks unpredictably, never quite resolving into recognizable melody before being pulled back under. Tempo is ambiguous: there's a pulse somewhere in the low frequencies, slow and organic, less like a kick drum than a heartbeat heard from inside the body. The overall texture is dense and slightly suffocating, but the affect is not oppressive — instead, it evokes the uncanny beauty of being deep in old-growth forest, surrounded by something vast and indifferent and fundamentally unhuman. Voigt situates this work at the intersection of ambient music and techno's ancestry, Cologne's industrial and classical heritage converging in sound that feels simultaneously ancient and synthetic. The emotional register is unlike almost anything else in electronic music: melancholy without sentimentality, beauty without comfort, an awe that has no object you can name. Listen to it alone, at significant volume, with the lights off — it requires and rewards complete surrender to its atmosphere.