Narkopop: An interplay between man and nature

 

Forest is a yearning place. Forest is en vogue. Well, that's what Wolfgang Voigt, co-founder of the established techno label Kompakt,17 years ago already did: The integration of the forest topic into his ambient project GAS.

Within his project he deeply merged electronic music and classic music into one, starting with the ZAUBERBERG (1997), KÖNIGSFORST (1998) and POP (2000). Since almost one year NARKOPOP, the fourth album was released bringing the project since years onto stage. Wolfgang Voigt remains on his Gas project path, following the well known sound architecture and structures. No surprise that the well kept wood “forest“ image did not change. The audiovisual injections are just state-of-the-art and no wonder that he even more consolidates the forrest topic into the project itself.

 

Which connection does music and forest offer? Certainly, at first glance, there is no satisfactory answer. But you can deduce it, starting by the product itself (music and visual component) and ending up with an enormous chain reaction. Because gas is a holistic concept, carried by techno and an atypical sound cosmos, embraced by the key visual: forest.

 
 

 

Forest as a symbol is multifaceted, mysterious and inaccurate. Disorientation towards the expansion of consciousness. But forest feels good, just because forest itself is so inaccurate.Rationality falls away. And so Wolfgang Voigt offers us a never ending bass drum which guides someone’s way through thick woods.

 

In addition to the straight kickdrum: a distorted sound. Amorphous, imprecise, nebulous. A tree becomes a forest. The forest becomes a habitat. Everything is alive now. And it cognitively digging into someone’s memory.

The final result is not just a coincidence sound. Everything had to grow over 20 years. Vogt's original idea to focus on the topic forest and music had a strong relation to his personal relationship to nature and a strong enthusiasm for romanticism like Casper David Friedrich, one of the most important German Romantic painter.

 

Thus Voigt's audiovisual stimulus transports into the forest  - a spot for an intense experience between man and nature. Here you meet you and yourself. The forest is escapism. So it is for Wolfgang Voigt. And for those who yearningly want to reconnect with nature.

 

With his current NARKOPOP album Wolfgang Voigt offers a sonic biotope full of music to be rediscovered every time it sounds.

+ Wolfgang Voigt 

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Wolfgang Voigt, born in 1961 in Cologne, Germany, is an artist, music producer, label owner and one of the co-founders of the Cologne-based electronica and techno label Kompakt.

Working under many different project names and pseudonyms (e.g. Mike Ink, Studio1, M:I:5, GAS, Love Inc., Freiland, Wassermann…), Wolfgang Voigt has continuously varied his own, unmistakable music style from the onset of the 1990s, spanning the spectrum from creating experimental and unusual hybrids by combining elements of techno with German Schlager and folk music, to pioneering, austere minimalistic concept techno series such as Studio1, a series that was limited to 10 vinyl releases, the cover of each bearing a plain color design without any text.