- With so much new music out there, you may wonder why Resident Advisor is reviewing a CD, limited to 500 copies, that was conceived not as an album but as a suite of music for a sound installation at a recent exhibition at Berlin's Haus Der Kulturen called Doofe Musik, Lieder zum Träumen, Betäuben Und Vergessen (translation: dumb music, songs for dreaming, numbing and forgetting). The answer is because it is by Wolfgang Voigt, a man who, under the pseudonym GAS, arguably created a new idiom for electronic music. Working at the interface of ambient and 4/4 techno, his immersive work was unusually atmospheric and emotionally-charged. Its use of repetitive loops in a fog-bound landscape of fathomless bass and muffled kicks laid the groundwork for everything from The Field to much of today's dub techno.
Rückverzauberung 9 isn't a GAS retread, but it is instantly recognizable as Voigt, with its slushy sound-quality, warm vinyl crackle and use of repetition to foster a kind of transcendent mindfulness. Still, the tone and structure are different. Where GAS evoked German forests in autumn, Rückverzauberung 9 calls to mind a pristine beach where waves lap against the shore under clear blue skies. Also, it's even more militant in its repetition. There are no kick drums to add momentum, just four or five intertwined loops that run on and on through the five tracks, seemingly unchanged, for minutes at a time. In its execution, it recalls Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4, but stripped of any flashiness or excess fat.
Of course, it's all part of Voigt's plan to lull you into a false sense of stasis. Skip between the tracks and the way Voigt mutates the fragments and patterns he's working with becomes obvious. "9.2" has the feel of a warped dub-reggae record—worn, stoned, beatific, endless—but by "9.4" those brass samples have, through tiny adjustments, become almost jaunty. It's not so much those major shifts that matter, so much as the way that, if you can lose yourself in Rückverzauberung 9, two things happen. The first is that you almost begin to aurally hallucinate, imposing your own interpretation on the loops and hearing each few bars differently. The second is that when Voigt does introduce an objectively minor new element, the impact is momentous, such is the level of your absorption.
The cumulative effect of all this will depend very much on your own headspace. If you fight Rückverzauberung 9—or if you listen to it while doing anything else—it can be nauseating, claustrophobic, oppressive. Instead, in the same way that people talk about being in the right frame of mind to take LSD, you have to open yourself to the kind of mindflight it enables, one which only you will be able to articulate.
Tracklist01. Rückverzauberung 9.1
02. Rückverzauberung 9.2
03. Rückverzauberung 9.3
04. Rückverzauberung 9.4
05. Rückverzauberung 9.5