Wolfgang Voigt plays Gas live

Some time into Wolfgang Voigt's performance of his Gas project in a small gallery in Leuven, I noticed that the burly man in the seat next to me was behaving a little oddly. He had his head hanging between his knees and was hyperventilating like a dying donkey. From time to time he'd swing his head up toward the huge screen in front of us (we were in the front row) and stare, terrified, at the endlessly replicating visuals in front of him. "Mein Gott" he moaned to himself, wiping the sweat from his brow with a sopping hanky before dropping back into the Ryanair emergency position. I half expected him to puke all over the floor. It was not a good gig to attend while on something. But then again, so powerful was the combined effect of the mysterious visuals and a musical score (which sounded like the workings of the molecular perpetual motion machine that turns the universe itself), that most of us left the place feeling quite 'altered' regardless.


Here's a similar show from Berlin. By the time this segment ended I was seeing blurry witches flit by on broomsticks. Fuck knows what the dude next to me was seeing.

The venue suited Voigt's show smashingly. It was half theatre and half cinema with a steep and cozy auditorium allowing the entire audience a terrific view of the visuals which were overwhelming in both size and strangeness. Voigt himself stood stage right, dwarfed by the gigantic projections representing the near mystical experiences he experienced wandering through forests as a youngster. Dressed in a snug velvet suit with a white cravat, he looked like something removed from olden times, the baron of a Bavarian castle as opposed to the founder of a contemporary techno label. As a fashion journo might say, he cast an impressive silhouette.

He stood motionless throughout, tweaking his laptop from time to time, occasionally glancing into the audience with an enigmatic look on his face, something between fascination and pride perhaps? Anyway, resplendent as he was, the emphasis was squarely on the visual effects behind him.



The music was a seamless mix of various tracks from the albums collected on the 'Nah und Fern' boxset. The mix leant toward the darker tracks. I don't think anything from 'Pop' (his dappled sunshine album) got an airing. This was shadowy, tangled and grand stuff, with drones coming down like prevailing winds from the Alps and the overall Gestalt shifting so imperceptibly from one mood to the next that I often snapped out of a dopey state of contemplation, alarmed and lost in 'new surroundings' so to speak.

Visually, I don't think I've ever been as impressed by a gig. Voigt's music is powerfully abstract and would certainly not work with visuals too representative of the real world. He knows this of course, and his intricate videos spun the most extraordinary semi-abstract patterns and impressions out of the undulating music. The building blocks were trees. Roots, branches and leaf veins were often discernible in the teeming and hypnotic panorama. But, as a young Voigt must surely have felt himself when lost in the forest, the sheer complexity of their their perpetual movements coupled with the music soon overwhelmed the inner eye, causing you to drift into wild imaginings and even contemplation of life itself budding and dying in its infinite ways. Colours were mostly muted. They changed slowly, from a dull red flickers on ferns to retina-searing bursts of screaming white. During the darker compositions (of which there were many) clever use of parallax motion created, for me at least, the illusion of ranks of animals or monsters moving through winter vegetation.

The gig built to a thunderous finish where a steady muffled beat grew clearer and louder, emerging from the amorphous uber-drone as spindly branches flashed into view, spotlit by epilepsy inducing flashes of lightning and rearing shadows.

I left the venue sweating and weak at the knees.

MP3: Gas-Zauberberg 3