Browse by Artist: VOIGT, WOLFGANG

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Ruckverzauberung 6
Label:	MAGAZINE (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$16.50
Catalog #:	MAGAZINE 007EP

Rückverzauberung (trans. "Reverse Enchantment") is a label-travel-project of Wolfgang Voigt. Voigt's music has always been based on contradictory sound constructs, oscillating between harmony and atonality. But on the beat-free "Rückverzauberung 6.1" and "6.2," sounds and structures are (reversely) enchanted in such a bizarre/abstract manner, that it is difficult to draw a comparison to other pieces from Voigt's catalog. Due to his technique of deconstruction/reconstruction to the essential/substantial, sounds that are somewhat familiar seem completely new. Voigt calls this "Dedivination."

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Freiland Klaviermusik
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	PROFAN 009CD

If experimental minimalistic dance music as we know it today had existed during the lifetime of Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, it might have sounded much like this present album. Something fascinating and possibly well known, is that Kompakt label founder Wolfgang Voigt has a fondness for historical music like this. Freiland-Klaviermusik stays true to this idea, maintaining its focus on music composed for the piano, but composed with a very different approach. It's once again Voigt's effort to find a musical structure that eliminates the boundary between freely-improvised "virtuosic" music and fine-incremental sequencing of a computer matrix. In Voigt's Freiland project there is one underlying theme; one single sound varied in many different ways surrounding the main idea of minimal-techno music: the four-to-the floor bass drum. In this case, it's a synthetic piano, which moves between rhythmic and abstract, between deliberateness and coincidence, within a somewhat predefined structure. Sometimes the clock of the bass drum does not accompany its presence at all. The present aesthetics of atonal, sometimes Kafka-esque and early 20th century classical music are rather a "pleasant by-product" than an authentic classical-music statement. Blasting borders and breaking rules to create apparently new revelations has always been Voigt's drive. Apart from his timeless preference to adopt different musical styles such as classical-music, jazz, schlager or brass music into his own music, in this case, Voigt's encounter with the music of composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) was an important influence. In Nancarrow's work, Voigt found strong parallels to his own; the search for unpredictability and spontaneity, often affecting his way of working, to find a symbiosis between man and machine. This approach has also influenced Voigt's work as a visual artist. The front cover of the record presents an excerpt from one of Voigt's Tetrapak-paintings, in which he covers, combines, and confronts a predetermined mechanical structure (pattern, wallpaper ≙ loop, pattern) with more or less a free, progressive, and rhythmic painting technique. The current releases on Voigt's re-launched '90s label Profan together with the reunion of his music with his lesser-known work as a performing artist represent that in 2010, Voigt sees minimal music through as it relates to minimal art rather than minimal techno. It could also be that Voigt believes that art can express complication and pain in ways that the minimal techno of today cannot.

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Kafkatrax
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	PROFAN 010CD

For Wolfgang Voigt, techno is a means of constantly reinventing himself. After the publication of the highly idiosyncratic Freiland Klaviermusik (PROFAN 009CD), the two Sog records Abweichung and Fremde Hände, and Du Musst Nichts Sagen, on Profan, his new album Kafkatrax is dedicated to the human voice. As in previous projects, Voigt is solely interested in the sound and the structure of the original material -- in this case, recited text. Using various cutting and covering techniques, he disassembles the text into a disturbing, abstract "literature rap" that at best creates an illusion of comprehending fragments of the shredded words and sentences left over. In combination with Voigt's typical Umta techno beat, the outcome is a kind of vocal polka consisting of voices and their side acoustics that sound like psychedelic without guitars or acid without 303. The fact that Voigt used a Kafka audio book CD, reminiscent of his literary preferences as a teenager, is entirely meaningless to the final musical product -- Voigt is only interested in the sound of recited vocal text. He could have equally used Thomas Mann or the Grimm Brothers. What is interesting, however, is that by covering and layering the voices across up to 5 octaves, a claustrophobic, nightmarish atmosphere is created that can definitely be described as Kafkaesque.

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Du Musst Nichts Sagen Remixe
Label:	PROFAN (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	PROFAN 036EP

Originally the B-side to Rückverzauberung 2, "Du Musst Nichts Sagen" marched towards a dark fortress, following a point-blank trail and inspired by the mute grit of the many. The remixes present three distinct alternatives, starting with the "Fanfaren Mix" that cranks up the amount of fanfare, the "Informel Mix," created as the soundtrack for an experimental video (http://youtu.be/49_-S5nWdMI) and the "Doppelvoigt Mix" which takes an interview given by Wolfgang Voigt and translates it into some sort of document of techno both abstract and humoristic.

Artist:	VOIGT, WOLFGANG
Title:	Gas
Label:	RASTER-NOTON (GERMANY)
Format:	Book w/CD
Price:	$45.00
Catalog #:	R-N 102CD

Softcover book/photographic art catalogue with exclusive audio compact disc included, 128 pages in full-color, shrink-wrapped together. For the first time ever, Wolfgang Voigt aka Gas presents the visual aspect of the comprehensive Gas project in print. It is not meant to be a monolithic retrospective of his visual work, but it features a broad spectrum of photographic images taken between 1995 and 1998, showing many different moods and perspectives of Wolfgang Voigt's cosmos. What they all have in common is the mystical focus and seemingly, the blurring of boundaries between lightness and darkness, happiness and depression, kitsch and art, pixels and leaves. With the enclosed CD, Voigt has opened his treasure chest and presents some well-selected, rare jewels from the very early days (and nights). Four of the five tracks have never been released or played before. In the middle of the 1990s, Wolfgang Voigt, better known under a great many pseudonyms such as Mike Ink, Studio1 or Grungerman, and the driving force behind the rise of Cologne minimal techno, had reached a temporary peak in his career. Going back to the 1980s, Voigt began working under a self-realized concept he named "Blei." Taking in the most varied sound models, he began to extract elements from classical, polka, or brass music, and along with electronic pop music and German schlager sounds, formed a distinguished and unique pop music style that would fit in with the subculture at that time. In the early 1990s, influenced by techno, Voigt began to experiment with a timbal marching through strongly alienated, free-floating string loops. These elegiac tracks, their lack of beginning or end, their intoxicating, smooth, and partly amorphous structure sounded to him like evaporating gas and thus, Gas music was born. In his music, Wolfgang Voigt does not create a direct reference to the original sounds he alters; rather, he tries to reduce the material to its basic aesthetic structure by using different zoom, loop and alienation techniques in order to release it from its original meaning and context. His intention is to create a kind of aesthetic essence, a cave (detail/loop/repetition) where you can get thrillingly lost.

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