Having first been exposed to the landmark 90s releases of Gas (a.k.a. Wolfgang Voigt) on the Mille Plateaux label courtesy of the Nah Und Fern box set (2008), I can personally attest to their timeless and enduring quality. All those early albums (Gas, Zauberberg, Königsforst, and Pop) didn’t strike me as “dated” or “retro” the way many electronic albums from that era do, chiefly due to GAS’s deft management of all those ethereal and hypnotic 4/4 loops. (A separate box set released last year, which basically mined the same sources but also included the Oktember EP, demonstrated how the Kompakt label could get away with pretty much just reissuing all this ageless music every few years in perpetuity; nobody would really mind — except maybe those minimal techno-hating nerds you see at Foo Fighters concerts, with their huge glasses and needless turquoise suspenders.)
But for some reason (?), Voigt and his cohorts at Kompakt don’t feel like resting on their sprawling, pillowy, vaguely psychedelic laurels anymore, because a brand new Gas album (the project’s first in 17 years), titled Narkopop, has just been announced! It’s out April 21 (pre-order it all-the-ways right here), and even though the accompanying press release attests to the album’s relying less on loops and more on an “entwined” musical structure… yeah, it still has that certain unmistakable Gas “magic.” Check out the album trailer for yourself down below, and join me in being swept off by the sudden wave of ASMR-related spinal tinglings as each subtle, forest-y hint of the album’s ghostly grandeur is teased.
Narkopop tracklisting:
01. Narkopop 1
02. Narkopop 2
03. Narkopop 3
04. Narkopop 4
05. Narkopop 5
06. Narkopop 6
07. Narkopop 7
08. Narkopop 8
09. Narkopop 9
10. Narkopop 10
11. Narkopop 11 (vinyl only)
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