6/9/2009
Poking around on the internet, I've been surprised not to see more reviews of what was truly an exciting evening of musical performance, at least for a particular breed of music fan: the North American debut of Wolfgang Voigt's legendary GAS project here in New York a few days ago. Part of the Wordless Music Series, which normally makes its comfortable home at Le Poission Rouge, GAS's debut in New York took place at an even brainier (and more staid) location: Columbia University's Miller Theatre, way uptown at 116th and Broadway (an intersection that maybe never looked more like Williamsburg before this night, judging by the very high per capita ratio of facial hair, forearm tattoos and thick plastic frame eyeglasses that filled the auditorium).
(Tattoo jokes aside, as a side note I should probably just come clean and mention here the personal pang of longing or something I felt for this spontaneously-assembled community of like-minded people. How many parties have I suffered through in Brooklyn, listening to someone gush about the new Grizzly Bear album? Where had all these GAS fans been all my life?)
Some background: Voigt is one of the founder's of Cologne's Kompakt label, known for a long string of influential 12" releases and occasional full-length albums that over the past decade have almost single-handedly transformed the landscape of contemporary techno. Kompakt releases are characterized both by their simultaneous deployment of relentless, lockstep 4/4 rhythmic structures and infectious melodies that often flirt with the language of pop music. Voigt's own releases under a host of aliases, including Love Inc, All, Mike Ink, Auftrieb and Grungerman, are among the label's most brutal and uncompromising.
But he is perhaps best known for GAS, a project that spans four classic albums, each one commencing in some way where the last left off. GAS's musical palette consists of soft, free-floating string loops in the Romantic tradition of Wagner or Schoenberg, sometimes left to float unmoored, but more often underpinned by a deep, muffled 4/4 throb. Experiencing a GAS record has been memorably likened to being locked in a closet with a Webern recording while a rave happens down the hall. Dreamy and psychedelic, GAS's music conjures images of ancient German forests, or so Voigt insists in marketing materials. The cover of the four albums each bear a photo by Voigt of a deep, murky forest scene (with the exception of "Pop," the final album, whose cover is adorned with blurry golden leaves).
Voigt's New York live debut was preceded by a performance that, on a different night, could have easily been a main event on its own: a live arrangement of Brian Eno's seminal ambient work, "Discreet Music," performed by Toronto-based musicians CONTACT. Their arrangement of Eno's work for synthesizers employed piano, vibraphone, cello, melodica, recorder, soprano saxophone, and electric violin. Fellow experimentalists Bang on a Can have become famous for their nimble live performances of Eno's equally airy "Music for Airports," and CONTACT's loving rendition of "Discreet Music" was a similar exercise in timing and restraint. Over the course of 45 minutes they allowed the haunting themes that comprise the body of "Discreet Music" to blossom and develop on the stage, gracefully shifting and overlapping, the layers bleeding into each other to create gossamer washes of carefully-constructed sound. For me, "Discreet Music" has always evoked images of a very slow approach toward some enormous, fantastical city through golden mist and clouds, something like the skyline depicted in C.R. Cockerell's "The Professor's Dream" (1848, see below). CONTACT's performance effectively evoked that kind of elegant light and shadow.
After a lengthy intermission, the theater was abruptly plunged into darkness. For a few moments, the curtain remained closed, with only a faint rumble of sub-bass issuing ominously into the theatre.
The program promised a "specially conceived 90-minute audio-visual concert" (video artist Petra Hollenbach created a string of moving images derived from Voigt's own photography of German forests to accompany the music). As the bass grew louder, eventually coalescing into a rhythmic pulse, the curtain creaked opened with a slowness that was almost comical, finally revealing Voigt anchored at stage right, controlling a laptop from a tall podium, dressed in regal black and white, his shall-we-say very German features framed in a high collar (was that lace?) and his blond hair sculpted into an angular pompadour.
Even for me, as frothy-mouthed a fan as they come (after all, here I am writing a 1000+ word review of the show on a streetwear-centric blog that usually concerns itself with limited edition Supreme bow ties and "the return of khaki," for example), it was hard not to laugh at the theatricality of the set-up. So profoundly German! Where was Albert Speer when you needed him? But my chuckles quickly dissolved (not that they could be heard in the first place) as the first composition filled the auditorium in earnest, complemented by Hollenbach's mesmerizing, slowly unfurling images.
Over the course of the set, Voigt drew on the highlights of the GAS catalog, which took on new life and variety live. Hollenbach's images seemed (and almost certainly were) designed to extend the forest metaphor that Voigt likes to invoke. As the tracks seamlessly blended one into the next, the landscape seemed to change, too -- from thick brambles to clearings dappled with sunlight and then back again into the woody depths of Teutonic mythology.
Perhaps not enough can be said here about how great the visuals were, and it's a shame that a cursory Google search doesn't offer up more on Hollenbach. If you've ever taken any kind of hallucinogen or psychedelic in hopes of enhancing your enjoyment of a new or beloved LP, this is the kind of experience you're always angling for: spectral forms that play just on the edge of recognition, patterns that slowly evolve into something always more baroque and otherwordly and phantasmagorical, rendering your experience at once sublime in the Bergsonian sense and also personal and maybe in some small way at least temporarily transformative or transcendental.
Time grew strange. I drifted in and out of consciousness. The insistent 4/4 thud seemed to stretch on forever, at once marking time and rendering it meaningless. As Voigt shifted into a long piece from "Zauberberg," without doubt the most unabashedly frightening of the GAS LPs, Hollenbach's visuals glowed a deep red. It was clear we were nearing a crescendo of some kind. The music at this point was, it must be said, terrifying. I looked over at one of my companions for the evening, a Julliard-trained opera singer. She was crying, and not out of joy or some kind of musical revelation, but in real, genuine horror, or so she would confirm afterward. After what might have been four or 24 minutes, a ghostly logo appeared amidst the swirling branches on the screen: "GAS." Growing larger, the single word marched unassailably toward the audience. I leaned back in my seat, trapped, craning my neck this way and that, my eyes riveted on the three white letters.
Suddenly, silence. After a dazed moment of the kind of black-edged consciousness you might feel in the wake of a concussion, the audience drew woozily to its feet in a kind of collective ecstasy. I looked down and saw myself applauding. I'm not sure how long we stood there. Voigt and Hollenbach came out and took several bows while I tried to focus my eyes, ears ringing, lost in the din and trying hard to imagine the cool evening air waiting outside, and maybe a light breeze.
