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.
No score yet, be the first to add.
“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.
