For this particular project, Voigt only has one pitch, but it’s a doozy.

As Philip Sherburne put it eight years ago, reviewing a rare live performance from GAS: “The point of GAS isn’t the moment or the riff; it’s the totality. How can music that seems to be monotonous convey such beauty and clarity?Earlier this summer, a story began to circulate about “Shinrin-yoku,” a coinage created by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in the early ’80s that basically translates as “forest bathing.” It’s not hiking or trail exploring per se (nor is it, as the name might suggest, stripping naked and bathing in a pile of leaves), so much as it is a meditation that provide its bathers “an opportunity to slow down, appreciate things that can only be seen or heard when one is moving slowly,” as one guide put it. When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he\n\ usually goes by Mike Ink, Love ...When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he usually goes by Mike Ink, Love, Inc, or M:I:5. So while the four original GAS records were boxed and compiled merely eight years ago, Originally, GAS was but one of Voigt’s innumerable pseudonyms, first arising in 1995 as a remix of his own sampledelic cover of Voigt had a lot of different approaches, so many that he had to keep switching aliases to contain them. to Four Tet, Kanye West to Joanna Newsom—and the many sides of Radiohead, too—here are the albums … His narcotic way with these loops, his ability to shift them in space, to slow them down even as the pulse beneath them intensifies, to ever-so-carefully alter the repetition so that it mystifies rather than lulls, remains unmatched. Mostly, the tints on each cover suggest the moods within. Discover releases, reviews, credits, songs, and more about Gaz - Gaz at Discogs. This steady 70-80 bpm bass pulse is the Gas trademark. Previous releases like Together, these carefully placed packets of noise blend into an immersing, downright amniotic environment, especially at sufficient volume. At this vantage point, the twigs take on another quality, and we get a small glimpse of the worlds that exists between knots on a twig. Shop Vinyl and CDs and complete your Gaz collection. In explaining the health benefits of “Shinrin-yoku,” one researcher suggested that it’s not the aroma of the trees that gives such bathers a sense of calm, but rather from a sense of “awe,” be it astronauts gazing down at the earth, tourists taking in the Grand Canyon, or even a young man recalling the forest from his youth. It’s as much a haunted memory of these nearly century-old classical recordings as it is a vague impression of last night's endless party, and as such GAS exists in a purgatorial state between the two.Despite spending nearly two decades with the albums, I’d be hard-pressed to distinguish the twenty-four tracks here. Nearly twenty years later, Wolfgang Voigt’s records under the GAS alias still assault our presumptions about electronic music. This change in perspective reminds me of the opening montage in David Lynch's The expanse and vastness of GAS reveals as much as the listeners are willing give to them, the level of attention and perception helping to create such awe. The delicate synthesized drones will veer too close to new age music for some, but fans of Eno's dreamiest ambient work and Aphex Twin's But while it begins cozy, uneasiness begins to creep into The photographs in the liner notes consist of extreme close-ups of tree branches. He muffles his telltale kick drum so that rather than shake a club's walls, it now seems to emanate from twelve feet under the forest floor. Whether it’s your first visit or a return trip into this world, the ability to travel into each track unaccompanied by Voigt yet find your own trail is part of what makes this music resonate decades later. He expects it to be a trend not unlike yoga in the future. It’s another take on the timelessness that distinguished the GAS albums of the early 1990s. The 200 Best Albums of the 2000s From M.I.A. Naturally, the documentation is sparse on the health benefits of “forest bathing,” though researchers have focused on the phytoncides given off by the plants, the so-called “aroma of the forest.”The emergence of “Shinrin-yoku” dovetails nicely with the most recent reissues of While nearly impossible to compile a linear chronology for his discography—which includes more than 160 albums and 40 aliases—in the intervening years since these pivotal albums were released, their influence has overshadowed his own prodigal body of work. Indie rock label whores may remember Voight as one half of Burger/Ink, whose hypnotic Voight suppresses the playful streak he exhibits as Mike Ink when he sits down to make Gas music. In this way, GAS continues to confer such medicinal, even magical, qualities upon its visitors.

Though it seems a bit comical at first (and definitely would have turned me off a few years ago), the …