GAS- Narkopop
Nothing about this is ordinary. It’s rare for an ambient album to make this kind of impact, it’s not normal for something so abstract to connect so quickly, and I think it’s singularly unique for an artist to shut a project down for almost two decades, as Wolfgang Voigt had done with GAS, only to come back better than ever. Although something of a follow-up to the otherwise prolific Voigt’s ‘Pop’ album from 2000, there is less lush colour here and much more darkness and melancholy. Even while it builds to a mutant orchestral yell, ‘Narkopop 1’ is something of a calm before the storm, ‘Narkopop 5’ (GAS doesn’t do song titles) soothes with washes of synths and presses on your temples with walls of noise, and that hush towards the end of ‘Narkopop 2’, that’s your speakers breathing a deep sigh of relief. A record for these dark days. Delightfully, defiantly, deliriously unordinary.
