Like an author of fantasy fiction, Wolfgang Voigt is continually rewriting and restructuring the internal logic of his own world, going back to his old work in the hopes of imposing some order upon his sprawling mythopoeia. His self-titled debut as GAS was one of several breakthroughs the German producer experienced in 1996, but its vast, emotionally neutral expanses of nothing had little to do with the sampledelia of his later work under the name; when he rereleased it on 2008’s Nah Und Fern compilation, he swapped two tracks out entirely for new work that felt more apiece with the approach he perfected on 1997’s Zauberberg. The Box set in 2016 further tinkered with the classics; Zauberberg gained 12 minutes, Königsforst got a new track sequence, Oktember had Side A completely swapped out for an older piece called “Tal 90.” Of the music he made during his original run of GAS albums between 1996 and 2000, only the flawless Pop exists in any definitive version.
November 89 folds one of the strangest outliers in the Wolfgang Voigt catalog under the GAS name. This is the first vinyl pressing of music that was originally released in 2008 as a CD insert with a book of the psychedelic forest artwork that’s a crucial part of the GAS aesthetic. It still shows up on streaming platforms as Wolfgang Voigt - GAS, confusing if you’re trying to Google it, with red-tinted artwork not far removed from that on Zauberberg. The music resembles that of GAS but is blockier, stranger, more oblong. The reissue indicates that some of this music dates back as far as 1989 and 1990, hence the titles “November 89” and “Tal 90,” but what of “Der Wald” and “Das Moor,” or the imposing, frightening 11-minute piece called “Nah Und Fern” that shares its name with the 2008 compilation? This package raises as many questions as it answers.
“This effectively completes the existing GAS vinyl series by adding the ‘first’ album, which had previously been missing,” reads a statement on the Kompakt Bandcamp. Interesting—are we meant to retroactively take this as the debut instead of GAS? At five tracks in 53 minutes, it’d be the shortest album under the name, and you can hear him fumbling towards the ideas he would fully develop on Zauberberg. The package depicts the usual impenetrable forest of the GAS packaging in stark, thorny monochrome. As a piece of vinyl, it looks damned good next to the other GAS albums. And for a project so deeply linked with Germany itself—to the Königsforst where Voigt experienced his youthful acid trips, to the Gothic-psychedelic sensibility that led to the conception of something like the Cologne Cathedral, to the whole tradition of German techno, even to stuff like glam and schlager and oompah—it’s appropriate its birth would occur in such an auspicious month in German history. In other words, it makes sense as GAS’ debut.
What made Zauberberg feel like a breakthrough was Voigt’s fluid control of samples, his ability to make slowed-down strings and surface noise sound as vast and forbidding as the spaces between the trees in the woods. On the music collected here, he achieves the same goals through cruder means. The foreground of “Der Wald” is filled with little pops, scrunches and raindrop sounds, and the effect is the same as when the vinyl crackle reaches out of the mix like grasping branches on Zauberberg. Deep, throbbing kick drum would play a crucial role on Zauberberg and Königsforst, but the only track with anything resembling a kick drum here is “Das Moor,” and it’s less of a kick than a continuous metallic scrape that throbs on time with a techno rhythm. “November 89” is bit-crushed until hardly any sound remains; I admit to a bit of skepticism about whether it was actually recorded at that time, but if it was, it establishes Voigt as the same kind of ahead-of-his-time thinker as Richard D. James, crafting a sound so contemporary it’s difficult to conceive what inputs around him might possibly have influenced it.
The best track is the one where the least happens. “Nah Und Fern” is a masterpiece of unsettling blankness to rival Basic Channel’s “Mutism.” There’s a continuous grainy hiss, as if you’re squinting through the static on a cheap video camera to make out a faint apparition. A sour woodwind sample flickers and disappears; the effect is simultaneously of stasis and almost unbearable tension. And then there’s “Tal 90” at the end, never my favorite Wolfgang Voigt work; it’s a bit too vacant and sunny as it drones on and on, but it’s much more effective as a coda to November 89’s earlier experiments than as a counterpart to the vastly more evolved B-side of Oktember. Its presence suggests the well of archived proto-GAS work doesn’t go very deep; Voigt initially put it on Oktember to avoid redundancy between its A-side and the first track of Königsforst, but now that it’s on November 89, it still appears twice in the “sequence” of albums.
Maybe Voigt is especially proud of “Tal 90” because it’s the earliest manifestation of a lot of things he’d do well later as GAS, not least capturing a shimmering, undulating quality through his use of string samples that more effectively simulates the feeling of being on psychedelics than almost any other music I’ve heard. But the continuity between the music collected here and the music he’d later perfect is in the feeling, and thank goodness for that, because nothing else—not his other projects, not the other Kompakt artists, not the many, many imitators in his wake—takes you to this place. This is music that seems to resonate from within the earth itself. To listen to this music is to experience the dark flipside of the idea of being connected to everything, where the heartbeat of the world is beating too fast and yours is pounding with it.
