Narkopop 5

Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project operates from a conceptual and sonic premise that remains completely original after decades of imitation: the sounds of rave culture — kick drum, synthesizer, bass — heard as if from deep inside a vast forest, every attack blurred by distance and foliage until the mechanics of club music become something close to environmental sound. This track from the 2017 album works as all Gas works: an undifferentiated wash of processed orchestral samples and electronic elements, a pulse that is felt more than heard, melodic fragments so blurred by reverb and pitch-shifting that they suggest rather than state. The effect is hallucinatory in the precise sense — not psychedelic in the rock tradition but genuinely disorienting in terms of scale and location, the listener unable to determine where the sound is coming from or how large the space containing it might be. Voigt grew up in Cologne near the forests of the Rhine region, and Gas encodes a specifically German relationship to forest as romantic, overwhelming, slightly threatening — the Romantic tradition's sublime landscape rendered in contemporary electronic music. The kick drum beneath everything, when it surfaces, is both grounding and strange: evidence of human time inside natural time.