#451 Gas - Pop

This might have been on some top albums of the aughts list?

Wolfgang Voight makes some experimental music, and this is no exception. 7 tracks, averaging nearly 10 minutes each, highly repetitive. Not just repetitive unto themselves, but across the whole album. Think Eno at his most ambient, or The Disintegration Loops, with less disintegration.

I don't think I could have reviewed this album, or even appreciated it, without a conversation I had a few months ago with John, a friend who's been studying music for years and years. I don't remember the details, but he introduced me to a musical composition concept whereby one starts with a melodic line and then enacts a series of transformations on it, reversing it, nudging it this way or that, according to some pretty specific rules. My first reaction was to interrogate whether this produced particularly compelling music to listen to: John seemed to dodge the issue a bit, redirecting to its conceptual value. I pressed. Was it more likely to lead you to more compelling music than more traditional methods? John seemed unwilling to commit to that level of endorsement. What's the point then, if it doesn't make better music?

Eventually, though, I did an end-around past that entire angle and came to see the approach's value, even if that value wasn't in its ability to create enjoyable music. What I eventually decided was this: when you hear music, it isn't necessarily about the experience of the hearing, not necessarily. You can express ideas through music, and what you mean to create may not the experience of hearing the notes themselves, but the experience of understanding the ideas behind the notes as they emerge and settle in your mind. Restrictions in structure bolster music's ability to bear super-sonic conceptual payloads, much as some poetry is aided by the imposition of structure. A long boring film may be a way of saying something about boredom, even as it fails to be a film.

This is all very possibly pseudointellectual hokum, or maybe the expression of larger ideas in the guise of a music review.. meta-hokum! And its about to get worse. How can you describe an object that does not exist? You can describe it, you can draw it, you can make a 3d animation of it, you can simulate its qualities in dance, and, yep, you can make music of it. Not about it, but of it, music that represents a thing.

This album, which I found underwhelming musically, was nonetheless compelling in its ability to create, fully formed in my mind, a notion of a slowly rotating crystal octahedron, as wide as t is deep, taller than it is wide, turning in a cave, spilling forth with light and tendrils of light. This stems, perhaps, from my notion of Acid Casual's signature synth surge as the turning of a lighthouse over the coast, repetitive sound as circular motion, sine waves as sine waves.

The crystal is realized through music, and is rendered in a way more real than if we could see it, as it plays out in dreamlike overload. It changes cyclically like the nights and days, and slowly over the course of the album like the seasons, the repetition again and again cementing its contours, much like frames make up comic motion, much like repeating events become habit, much like jokes become catchphrases, much like seeing a loved on every day makes up your notion of who they are and what they are capable of and what they are not. The color of the light changes, the tone of the place changes, tension creeps in, a sense of dying or exploding or being reborn emerges, like the end of Akira or Princess Mononoke or Metropolis or any anime when the world is rent and we learn that all of man is wrong. This album is a thing. It is not the experience of listening to beat or melody, though those are fleetingly present, it is the experience of knowing that thing 4/5

You might like this if: you finished reading that whole review. It demonstrates the requisite ability to tolerate bullshit.