Life’s a GAS with Wolfgang Voigt

Plus Sully, Cloakroom, Harald Grosskopf and more

GAS on stage… somewhere.

It seems appropriate for an artist named GAS that you can never quite tie down the music of Wolfgang Voigt and his long-standing psychedelic / ambient / techno project. I have spent hours listening to GAS, luxuriating in the project's amorphous and yet concentrated glory, from 1995’s Modern EP to 2021’s Der Lange Marsch album. And yet I never seem to get bored of it, possibly because I never quite understand it.

What is GAS? On the face of it, GAS is a project inspired by Voigt's teenage excursions in the Königsforst, densely packed with samples that have been re-worked, fudged and smeared beyond recognition. But it's so much more than that, too. GAS records have a magical, melancholic edge that transports me back to a childhood I never lived and to a forest I have never visited.

I interviewed Voigt when he came to Barcelona to play a GAS live set in early February. (You can hear the full interview here.) Voigt typically brings the live GAS experience to cinemas and theatre halls, where the audience can take in GAS's heavy musical experience sitting down or lying on the floor, in vertically chilled splendour.

In Barcelona, though, he was set to play a dub techno night at Razzmatazz, one of the city's biggest clubs, a setting that seemed potentially challenging for a project that demands silence and attention. Is GAS dub techno? I don’t think so. But, at the same time, I can see how its echo-and-atmosphere-heavy make up would fit in a dub techno setting. And it is here that I start the interview with Voigt, a sharply dressed man in his 60s, with immaculate white hair and teeth the envy of British dentists.

"Is GAS dub techno?" He ponders the question for a while. “Most of all it’s not a dub techno project or it’s not very well known as a dub project…. GAS has existed for more than 30 years now and there are always two ways that people have understood GAS. The most popular is the idea of GAS, that is based in abstract, classical, dark music, strings and horns; where a very far away bass drum, which reminds you of techno or techno events, walks through endlessness to far, far away strings. For this reason there is some kind of beat behind these forest-like sounds, which reminds people a bit of dub. Some people understood this as a bit like dub techno. It is OK for me to call it dub techno. I am fine with dub techno but officially GAS is something else.”

When I speak to Voigt it is early evening, backstage at Razzmatazz. Razzmatazz is a fantastic club, perfect for a night of clattering beats. But it feels far removed from the dark woodland fantasies that GAS’s music brings to mind. The GAS legend, as told and re-told, is that the music was influenced by Voigt’s experiences on LSD in the Königsforst, close to his hometown on Cologne. But it turns out that is only half the story.

The visual side of GAS, as seen on record sleeves and live videos, centres around “this idea of the romantic and dark forest and getting lost”, Voigt says. And this was influenced by the teenage Voigt’s psychedelic experiences in the Königsforst. Musically, though, Voigt says GAS is “about an abstract idea of using very special classical sounds, combined with certain kinds of beats”.

Like many GAS fans, I have romanticised the idea of the Königsforst as a mythical place where magic exists and beautiful music runs free, a notion probably helped by the fact I have never been there. When I ask Voigt to describe the forest, he says it is more boring - “a forest, like every forest”.

Disappointing as that may be, my other romantic notion - that GAS is the music that Voigt wishes he could have listened to during those psychedelic teenage experiences - is slightly closer to the mark.

“It could be,” Voigt says when I put this to him. “I had this GAS idea of music in my head, somewhere in my heart, ages before I started to make really professional music, or started concrete work on the GAS project. When I invented and formed GAS, in the early to mid 90s, it was based on my memories of this experience, music combined with psychedelic experiences in nature, in the forest.”

Musically, he says he was inspired by the work of Klaus Schulze, a member of Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel and other bands. “My main motto was this arpeggiator, sequential: ‘dit dit dit dit’. [He impersonates a fetching arpeggiator riff.] Klaus Schulze was my hero in 75 / 76. And a certain idea of being hypnotic and psychedelic, of course, you find in GAS music.”

GAS may have deep roots in Voigt’s childhood in the North Rhine-Westphalia. But it also brings me back to own youth in Scotland, 1,200km away from Cologne, a decade later and a good deal less psychedelic. But a childhood spent in forests, nonetheless. For me GAS’s music is incredibly nostalgic, an indelible callback to my childhood, even though I didn’t hear GAS until I was in my 20s. I wonder if it has a similar effect on its creator.

I ask Voigt if he is a nostalgic person. “Yes and no,” he replies. “There is a certain sentimental, nostalgic, even emotional moment and a certain attitude in the music of GAS, of course. And the guy who tells his personal feelings with GAS music is, of course, [doing so] by romantic feelings, even by clichéd ideas of getting lost in beautiful nature, in the mountains, in the forest.”

On the other hand, Voigt is “a radical pop-art-educated artist and for me, this is only surface”. “I don’t have to go to the forest to make this a more authentic experience, or to bring people to the forest to listen to this music,” he says.

“I'm more of a radical. I see it [GAS] through pop-art glasses. For me the forest is what Marilyn is for Andy Warhol. This is the point which is very important for me. I'm not getting lost in sentimental ideas. I want to show feelings and I want meaning, to push people, but also to stay on the radical pop-art theory ground. I want to mix these two ideas until there's no contradiction anymore.”

GAS’s music, I explain to Voigt, is also very sad for me.

“It is!” he replies, enthusiastically, before backtracking a little. “Let's say there is a very sad track but the next time, it's very beautiful… After more than 30 years of GAS, I still don't understand the difference between sad and happy, dark and light, loud, beat… It’s a situation; it's a room I enter without any expectation and then it happens. So if it's sad for you; maybe for somebody else the same phrase is not sad, it's nice.”

I think about this duality later that night. It’s still pretty early when Voigt comes on stage, by Barcelona standards anyway, and the room is at the level of full whereby you can still just about savour the stale beer smell of lived-in clubs. Some of the audience are sitting on Razzmatazz’s slightly sticky floor but I don’t want to join them. I’ve seen this room in the light.

I wish I was watching GAS play live in a forest; or, perhaps, in one of those cinemas where I could stretch out my limbs on a comfy chair and immerse myself deep in the spectacle and thick, verdant sound. I want to feel sad and nostalgic and wrapped up in myself; I want to forget where I am for one hour and live deep in GAS world.

I asked Voigt about the club setting earlier and he said that tonight’s gig would be an experiment for him. He doesn’t do a lot on stage, there’s no showmanship, and GAS’s music very much is what it is: there will be no flashy breakbeats and crowd-pleasing riffs.

“In rooms like this, I guess I will play a bit more tough, a bit more bass, a bit more groovy,” Voigt says. “But GAS is always abstract for sounds, horns and and strings, sometimes with and sometimes without bass and bass drum. And this will be the same tonight, maybe louder. But not different here.”

As the gig continues, I start to lose myself in music and thought. Voigt weaves fantastically un-knowable sounds in and out of the mix, as the bass hits murkily, transporting us up and out of Barcelona and into a magical place of sadness and beauty. I still don’t understand GAS; but I can definitely feel it.

Before the interview ends, I wanted to ask Voigt about GAS’s un-knowability, which seems crucial to the music’s success. Does he understand the music he makes as GAS?

Voigt ponders the question. “Unknowable is an interesting term,” he says eventually. “I get so much fan mail where people describe very special, very touching, experiences, even experiences to do with their health. I had a guy from Scotland and he had been in the Iraq War in the 90s and he was suffering from hyper-arousal. He said nothing could help. And he told me he got in touch with GAS music and he felt healed by it. He told me he listened to it 10,000 times.”

When he plays live as GAS, Voigt adds, sometimes people see things in the background videos that might not be there. “In the inner psychedelic room of my sounds and my worlds, things happen that you can’t really control. There are so many people who see the forest in the video; they say, ‘I have seen an animal. There is a ghost, there are some eyes, I have seen a hand running through… ‘ It’s all not there but people think they see it.

“It was not my intention to do this,” he adds. “It’s not like, ‘Ooh what’s that? It’s spooky.’ I do what I feel. And at a certain point I feel like now it should be right. I am never 100% sure. And also the interesting thing is that I really don’t 100% understand myself what happens.

“When I stop playing, working on GAS, on the shows, I haven’t played in a while. And then before I go to the gig, I get in touch with this world. I don’t miss GAS when I don’t listen to GAS. But when I am into GAS, I am into it. Then it works. It’s something I can’t explain. You go in there. And then things start working. That’s how it is for me.”

For me too. I feel I understand GAS a bit better after talking to Voigt. But ultimately you can no more explain the wonder of GAS than you can tie down a rainbow. What I do know is that on a cold and wet night in Barcelona, with a sticky floor and stale aroma, Voigt made GAS magic happen.

Some listening

Sully - Model Collapse

As someone who used to frequent drum & bass clubs and the occasional dubstep soirée, I thought I had heard it all in terms of bass-line pressure. But Model Collapse, by Norwich producer Sully, manages to take the bass into previously unexplored parts of my brain, fashioning an ever-shifting, acidic industrial rush of a bass line that would probably destroy your soul if heard loud in a foggy basement but sounds agreeably out there when at home in the sunshine. There’s not a lot more to Model Collapse than that, admittedly, but nor does there need to be.

Cloakroom - Story of the Egg

Indiana power trio - it says here - Cloakroom perfect the vital shoegazing art of marrying drive to drift on Story of the Egg, the third single from their new album Last Leg Of The Human Table. While the drums and bass hammer it along like it’s last orders at the Camden Falcon, the song’s guitar seems to emanate off the musical mix like pond gas, as if only vaguely related to what the rest of the band is up to, while the singer has the melodic mutter of a man laying down a vocal under the shade of an apple tree. Ride used to occasionally do this kind of thing and I always loved them for it.

Circuit des Yeux - Canopy of Eden

Circuit des Yeux - aka Haley Fohr - has one of the most awesome voices in modern music, an operatic, dramatic tone that I have seen called “an impassioned baritone” by those who know more about these things. For me, it brings to mind Elizabeth Fraser’s voice, not so much because the two singers sound similar - they don’t - but because they both feel like incredible rarities in the indie guitar world, utterly alien and yet beautifully employed. Fohr’s voice makes pretty much anything she releases worth listening. But Canopy of Eden is particularly spectacular, with the song’s gothic, industrial charm, like Nine Inch Nails covering Sisters of Mercy on a pop day, the perfect bed for her vocal skill.

Harald Grosskopf - Synthesist

First released in 1980, Harald Grosskopf’s Synthesist fairly obviously isn’t new. But it is to me, after I ran into it on a new compilation Krautrock Eruption - An Introduction To German Electronic Music 1970-1980, which accompanies a book of the same name by Wolfgang Seidel. What’s more, Synthesist is basically perfect, with an arpeggiated riff and simple but expressive beat providing the base for star-swept synth lines, like Kraftwerk’s Autobahn taking off and into space or Tangerine Dream letting their hair down in an Italian disco. The song sounds like it came about effortlessly, which is some feat of engineering, given that Grosskopf laboured over the parent album for months, faced with a temperamental Minimoog that could only be regulated by keeping a 60-watt lightbulb close at hand.

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke - Back in the Game

What excites me most about this ambitious collaboration is not the involvement of Thom Yorke, or the return to the fray of Mark Pritchard, who has made so many brilliant electronic music records I could barely even begin to list them (although let’s start with Global Communication’s timeless 76:14); it is the fact that Back in the Game features what sounds a lot like a tuba, which is a most overlooked instrument in popular music. OK, I am being slightly tongue in cheek - and the track’s alluringly weird low-end parp is actually a synth - but it seems somehow indicative of this song’s proggy spring, appetite for life and general adventure that you wouldn’t put any instrumental choices past the duo. (And, indeed, the album apparently features bass clarinets, bassoon and cor Anglais.) This is a long-winded way of saying that Back in the Game is a very special song indeed and I really look forward to seeing where Pritchard and Yorke might takes things next.

Things I’ve done

RPS Presents - Nubya Garcia

Nubya Garcia is a dazzling musician and a dream interviewee: open, funny, honest, interesting, charming and more. Johann and I spoke to her before her equally brilliant Barcelona gig and you can see the results here. We discussed loving yourself, the Odyssey odyssey, the visceral appeal of the saxophone, bespoke incense, Andre 3000 and more.

The playlists

Some people make their playlists only available to paid subscribers. So, in a sense, if you follow mine you are actually earning money. And who could say ‘no’ to free cash? Hooray, then, for my best new music of 2025 playlist. And three cheers for my very, very long playlist of the best music from the last five years.