"As ignorable as it is interesting." Brian Eno's liner notes to 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports did two important things for ambient music: First, they drew a through-line between Erik Satie's so-called furniture music to the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, and on to the actual furniture music of Harry Bertoia and Eno's own experiments in sound. Second, they neatly justified how boring Ambient 1 really was.
The first was more important, of course. Eno finally gave a name to the shapeless set of avant-garde sounds that, with the arrival of German groups like Cluster and Tangerine Dream, was in serious danger of being labeled "Muzak" and written off completely as fluffy wank. As someone who has spent more than $50 on an Ash Ra Tempel LP can tell you, Eno's ploy worked. Today, ambient is a genre with a number of famous and semi-famous purveyors: Moby, Aphex Twin, the Orb. Funny thing about that list, though? None of those acts has released a proper ambient album in what seems like an eternity. Which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of records being released in the genre. As someone who spends more than $50 on Pete Namlook records every month can tell you, there are. It's just that, à la Paula Cole, I've been wondering: Where is my Brian Eno? Where are my melancholic synthesizer tunes? Where have all the (big-name) ambient producers gone?
We know where Wolfgang Voigt went, at least: The man behind Gas (perhaps the most famous of his more than 30 pseudonyms, each exploring separate styles and aims) left ambient music in 2000 to run one of the most successful electronic-music labels in the world. As co-head of Cologne's Kompakt imprint, Voigt is now too busy filing invoices and processing payments to make much music of his own. But as listeners continue to sift through the piles of vinyl he released in the '90s, Voigt's most beloved material—the swirling, nebulous forest symphonies of Gas—remained out-of-print for much of the '00s. (2000's Pop, his most popular title, currently goes for $75 on Amazon.) Later this month, Kompakt will change all that, releasing Voigt's quartet of full-lengths in a box set entitled Nah und Fern (Near and Far), while the Raster.Noton label will put out Gas: Loops, a book of Voigt's nature photographs and a CD of previously unreleased material. Broadly speaking, Gas can be boiled down to two elements: genetically altered samples from classical music and a muted bass drum. The alterations, of course, are the thing—Voigt twists Wagner, Berg, and Strauss into unintelligible versions of themselves, transforming them into thrilling and deeply immersive works whose loops evoke lapping waves. As Voigt once told an interviewer: "I had an image in my mind of . . . an exhilarating streaming music which literally flows over, which has no beginning or end, no hard edges, only softness . . . An elegiac sound . . . held together by an invisible bass drum that comes marching by somewhere hidden in the woods, coming closer and fading away again. It was an acid experience. Basically, it's drug music."
