Wolfgang Voigt, influential electronic music artist of world acclaim and founder of the renownend Kompakt label, will perform his legendary ambient project GAS live for the opening concert of the 10th edition of the CTM festival.

Voigt will present GAS in the form of a specially conceived audio-visual performance, created in collaboration with video artist Petra Hollenbach, at Berlin''s beautiful Volksbuehne theatre on 22nd of January 2009.

In conjunction with a stream of hypnotic images derived from Voigt''s own photography, GAS live will take the audience on a metaphysical journey through the german forrest and its ambivalent mythological inventory.

With his four GAS albums, released between 1996 and 2000, Voigt created a new, previously unheard musical aesthetic: sounds inspired by German romantic music are interwoven into fluid, ephemeral stuctures that evoke transient spaces and plunge the listener into an ecstatic experience. In 2008 Kompakt re-released all four groundbreaking albums in a CD-box. At the same time Raster-Noton published a book that presents the visual aspect of the comprehensive gas project with a selection of Voigts photography, that also serves as base material for the visual concept of the GAS live show.

The concert is one of very few live appearances of Voigt after 12 years of abstinence, while he was focussing on developing Kompakt as an important hub for independent electronic music.

Wolfgang Voigt has been one of the key figures of German electronic music since the late 1980s. Known for his prolific output under various pseudonyms like Mike Ink, Blei, Love Inc. or Grungerman, the Cologne based artist has been formative for the German techno movement in the early and mid 90ties and the broad range of electronic musicians that followed. Voigt''s work within the labels Kompakt and Profan both founded and run by him ­ stands for the carefull and successfully balancing of artist''s need for independency, a critical view on zeitgeist and the necessity of economical efficiency.

With Wolfgang Voigt the 10th edition of CTM will be inaugurated by an artist, who not only helped coining the musical development of the past two decades, but who continues to seek answers and recipies to face the challenges of the ongoing transformation of independent music culture.