Gas in New York

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  • While it wasn't the North American—or even United States—premiere, hardly anyone seemed to care in New York when Wolfgang Voigt took the stage at Miller Theater at Columbia University to perform as GAS. Ambient music fans had been waiting for years—especially after last summer's arrival of the Nah Und Fern box set—to see the versatile producer perform his seminal compositions in person. More than 700 packed into the theater for the show, which began with an interpretation by CONTACT of Brian Eno's Discreet Music. The septet ensemble included a variety of instruments: electric strings, a baby grand piano, soprano saxophone, recorder and orchestral bells. While the mission behind the Toronto-based collective is to blur the boundaries between artist and audience, we were left stirring in our seats in anticipation for the main event. The visuals revolved around the concept of layering, which was very much the prime element of their half-hour performance. Recycling a four-note pattern, each musician worked around a gaseous idea of a melody and maintained a continuous flow of resonance. Photo credit: Ricardo DeLima CONTACT soon finished, though, and the the grand drapes parted, revealing Voigt, dressed in a soft purple suit behind a waist-high table that featured enough machinery to control our sensory receptors for the following hour-and-a-half. A projection of Petra Hollenbach's visuals, which were inspired by Voigt's photography and Germany's Black Forest, were displayed on an enormous projection screen on the stage's background, while Voigt left a sharp silhouette of his upper body on the lower corner of the projection screen, adding an essential link between the music and graphics. Voigt's set wandered through all four albums. And while an attempt to take notes may have seemed futile, it proved an important point. My blank pages were scribbled in the dark with one-word descriptions: "massive," "dark," "red," "distance." They're apt descriptors, sure. But the point of GAS's music and visuals is that you're never really supposed to know what's in front of you. Visual patterns danced between nature from near and afar, at times like a ballet in stop motion. While Voigt's classical music sampling is a major ingredient in GAS's textures, the meeting ground between synthetic, man-made music and organic sounds makes his work very much a diagram of nature's own anatomy. There were moments where the kick drums carried a steady rhythm, but they were smoothed out by guiding softer, cooler tones. Photo credit: Ricardo DeLima In the end, there was a convergence of dark and light finesse that lead up to the end of Pop, the fourth and final album that Voigt released under the GAS name. On par with the flashing animation used to test for epilepsy, the "camera" stood back and gave way to a clear view of the forest setting that had been continuous throughout the performance. The tall trees glowed between spectral spasms as red, green and violet and the music reached its most menacing curve. Three letters, spelling out the project's title, slowly approached our range of vision. After an immediate standing ovation for Voigt and Hollenbach, the crowd slowly filed out of the theater, many with a similar feeling of satisfying and cerebral drainage.
RA