Wolfgang Voigt – Ruckverzauberung 9 / Musik Fur Kulturinstitutionen (2014)

Wolfgang Voigt is far from a household name, but he nonetheless proved one of the most influential artists of the last decade. The Cologne producer and Kompakt co-founder has put out a mountain of material under a variety of aliases over the last 20-plus years, but it’s his work as Gas at the turn of the century that’s proved most lasting in a way that transcends techno nerdery.
Inspired by Voigt’s experiences taking acid in Köln’s Königsforst forest when he was younger, his four albums as Gas — most notably, the 2000 masterstroke Pop — are pinnacles of ambient music, applying a 4/4 sensibility to dense, pretty thickets of drone. The project was direct inspiration for Axel Willner’s classic 2007 debut as the Field, From Here We Go Sublime, a titanic crossover record for techno that, in turn, lent inspiration to scores of bedroom producers to this very day. (Even Voigt himself has indirectly addressed this legacy, briefly resurrecting the dormant Gas project last year to remix the title track to Willner’s latest album as the Field, Cupid’s Head.)

Gas is an incomplete representation of Voigt’s work, and that goes for anything else from his catalog, too. His sonic shifts from one release to the next that have proven as quixotic as they have pleasurably surprising. The last five years, especially, have been creatively fertile for Voigt, and a small sampling of his catalog from that time period suggests an artist that, even as he grows older, remains restless: last year, he resurrected his Mike Ink alias to put out three engaging 12” of 303-abusing techno, while 2010’s Freiland Klaviermusik was almost infuriatingly unique, an anti-musical combination of piano loops and dry synthesized bass that ultimately grated on the ears. Last year’s Zukunft Ohne Menschen was a sometimes-beautiful collection of arpeggiated tonal work; earlier this year, he released a pair of singles dubbed Polkatrax, which—you guessed it—took polka’s flatulent accordion sound and twisted it to fit a traditional techno structure.

Despite the lamb-and-tuna fish-like combination of that description, the Polkatrax singles were among of the more listenable and straightforward of Voigt’s recent releases, which highlights why, despite his difficult reputation, Voigt’s latest work is always worth seeking out. You never know what you’re going to get from him next,. Rückverzauberung 9/Musik Für Kulturinstutionen continues the trend. The five-part suite was crafted for an exhibition in Berlin’s Haus Der Kulturen (featured, luminously and beautifully, on this release’s cover art) called Doofe Musik, Lieder zum Träumen, Betäuben Und Vergessen, which translates to “dumb music, songs for dreaming, numbing and forgetting”. So without hearing a note of this work, there’s an academic, distanced element to this release that might scare away casual passersby. But Rückverzauberung 9 tuns out to be his strongest release of this decade thus far.

”Rückverzauberung” roughly translates to English as “reverse enchantment,” and Voigt has used the word over the last few years to tag a series of releases that fit the bill. In terms of Voigt’s 2010s catalog, Rückverzauberung 9 bears strongest resemblance to 2011’s Rückverzauberung 4, a release that alternated between harmonious noise and discordant, colliding soundscapes that sounded like a few disparate instruments playing simultaneously and out of melodic step with one another. That certainly sounds complicated, and makes Rückverzauberung 9’s comparative appeal easy to understand: its composition is almost brutally simplistic, with slow loops of brass and accordion that double over themselves, become untangled, and messily rejoin over 52 contemplative, blissful minutes. The textured, nearly studious approach to repetition is unmistakably Voigt; even in a genre where it’s considered a kind of monastic virtue, few artists have done as much with the concept as he has, and this is the latest example of his finding quiet nirvana in the realm of the infinite.

The temptation to compare Rückverzauberung 9 to Voigt’s work as Gas is understandable; this is, after all, the closest he’s come to replicating his work in the field of ambient techno in quite some time. There’s no pounding 4/4 beat lying underneath these tracks, but the way the brass loops hypnotically undulate as the music plays does provide a specific pulse. As the proclamatory fanfare of Rückverzauberung 9’s opening minutes turns slightly menacing, hitting an exquisite stretch of gloom near its midsection, I’m reminded of Voigt’s work with Jörg Burger as Burger/Ink on the pair’s classic full-length from 1998, the deep techno opus Las Vegas—specifically, the dark magic of “Flesh & Bleed”—not so much in terms of genre constraints as in its ability to conjure a downcast mood that, even as it sounds forbidding, invites you to get lost in its elliptical glory.

As Rückverzauberung 9 crests, falls, and crests again before embracing a slow fade in its closing moments, Voigt’s golden-sounding fog most smacks of a release that isn’t his own—specifically, Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s 2004 composition Virðulegu forsetar, which similarly stretched a single cluster of brass-based melody over the course of an hour, to dazzlingly hypnotic effect. Virðulegu forsetar’s 2003 live premiere was in a large cathedral in Reykjavik, accompanied by under-inflated helium balloons that slowly fell into the crowd over the course of the performance’s runtime, and while taking in the gorgeous sighs of Rückverzauberung 9, it’s hard not to close one’s eyes and imagine something similarly serene.