Life’s a Gas

Wolfgang Voigt’s vision is one of the most idiosyncratic in electronic music, and one of the most influential. The German producer spent his formative years listening to glam rock and taking psychedelics in Cologne’s Königsforst before discovering acid house in his late 20s, swearing allegiance to the bass drum and flooding the rave scene with dozens of EPs as Mike Ink and other aliases. By the time he and a few like-minded pals opened the Delirium record store in 1993, which would eventually give rise to the Kompakt empire and shape the sound of techno in the 2000s, Voigt was a central figure in Cologne’s small but thriving scene.

Sometime in the mid-’90s, though, a romantic sensibility crept into Voigt’s work. He got deeper into sampling experiments with the Roland W-750. He started naming his tracks after songs by the Bee Gees and Roxy Music. Most crucially, he started formulating a tangle of connections that folded specifically European reference points like glam rock, German schlager and oompah music, and the work of composers like Berg, Wagner, and Schoenberg into an aesthetic singularity with some deep truth that Voigt seemed to hear echoing from nature itself.

You could spend hours poring over charts and graphs, drawing lines with a red pen between the disparate inputs that feed into Voigt’s vision, but the output spoke clearly and directly to audiences on both sides of the aisle dividing rockers and ravers. [Las Vegas], Voigt’s 1996 collab with Jörg Burger as Burger/Ink, was picked up by indie-rock heavyweight Matador for stateside distribution in 1998. GAS, Voigt’s long-running ambient project based on string samples and heavy vinyl crackle, is one of a handful of acts someone just getting into ambient music is likely to discover.

Meanwhile, the “schaffel” beat that Kompakt producers like Jürgen Paape and Superpitcher were adopting—an adaptation of the 12/8 rhythm associated with glam rock filtered through the swing of German oompah bands—found its way into everything from P!nk’s restaurant mishaps to Goldfrapp’s lab-rat experiments, from one of Kanye’s most unfortunately prescient songs to one of Adam Lambert’s most conspicuous live-TV smooches. An excellent playlist from Matthew Perpetua tracks the long trail of footprints that glam rock stomped across techno, as filtered through the sound of Kompakt and its affiliates.

The Rosetta Stone uniting all these disparate threads is Life’s a Gas, Wolfgang Voigt’s debut full-length album, released in 1996 as Love Inc. Life’s a Gas got some attention from a German rock press that was typically indifferent toward techno, yet it remains one of Voigt’s lesser heard albums. For one thing, it’s not available on streaming—likely due to its surfeit of samples, conspicuously lifted from the pop and rock music Voigt would’ve heard during his formative years as a music listener.

Voigt has complained in the past that critics read too much into his use of samples. “To me it's not about what’s been sampled, but what comes out on the other side,” he said. But while that might apply with GAS’ overwhelming drones, it’s hard to make the same argument with Life’s a Gas, whose cover, by Bianca Strauch, is plastered with the sleeves of classic albums from Miles Davis’ electric awakening In a Silent Way to Roxy Music’s exquisite swan song Avalon. The record literally wears its influences on its sleeve, perhaps inspiring professed Voigt acolyte Panda Bear to include a list of influences with his own sampledelic ode to youth, Person Pitch. It’s like a shrine to the act of listening.

Standing astride Life’s a Gas are two remixes of “Hot Love,” the epochal single T. Rex famously performed on Top of the Pops in February 1971, kicking off the glam-rock revolution. Voigt would’ve been nine or 10 at the time, the perfect age to have his mind blown by the mysteries of rock’n’roll, and the way the 12/8 shuffle of “Hot Love” carries through the Kompakt catalog suggests Voigt was not the only one in his group to have been bitten by the glam-rock bug during the genre’s period of dominance in Europe. Just as that beat would show up in glam-era hits by everyone from Bowie to Queen to Suzi Quatro to Gary Glitter, so would it set the tone for the schaffel techno that’d become crucial to Kompakt’s identity.

“Hot Love (Mike Mix),” the first of the two remixes, is like an attempt at burrowing into the feeling of being young and impressionable and having your bodily rhythm sync with that of a song in a way that makes you feel emboldened and enlarged. If the promise of an edit is to distend the best moment of a song for as long as a remixer or a DJ desires, this is one of the most poignant and personal examples of the form. It sounds the way you might remember “Hot Love” if you’d heard it a long time ago and spent the ensuing years trying to place that violently swung beat and those serpentine string embellishments. It’s nearly hyperreal, boiling down Bolan’s already potent distillation of badassery even further until all that’s left is pure awe.

The second version of “Hot Love” is the GAS mix, which elevated an inconspicuous project of Voigt’s to center stage. Here, the string filigrees of “Hot Love” become pitched-down gashes that threaten to swallow the mix like the black cloak of F.W. Murnau’s Mephistopheles. It makes you look at the GAS project differently once you realize that the name comes not from the vaporous state of matter but from T. Rex’s “Life’s a Gas.” A lot of the essential elements of Bolan’s sound carry over to Voigt’s take on ambient music: magisterial fade-ins and fade-outs, gossamer strings, a steady bass drum, and, above all else, a sense of fearful symmetry.

Though Life’s a Gas scans as a distinctly pop release, especially in contrast with Voigt’s earlier acid 12"s, it has no songs per se, and only one complete phrase is sung during its runtime. That would be the title phrase, ripped directly from the T. Rex song of the same name and allowed to meander over a looped snippet of Roxy Music’s “True to Life” for nearly 15 minutes. It’s less accurate to say Life’s a Gas ends with the title track than that it ends with a vast pocket of space through which the title track is allowed to wander. Voigt’s treatment of the sample uncannily evokes the approach vaporwave producers would take 15 years later, stripping bits of ephemeral radio pop down to ghostly patinas and examining our relationships with the stray songs that rattle around in our memories.

Life’s a Gas was released on vinyl and as an extended CD version. The vinyl record is more explicitly a dance album, featuring the TB-303 workout “T.R.I.B.U.T.E.” along with the three T. Rex remixes and three more traditional techno tracks. But the 72-minute extended version of the album sounds halfway like a rock long-player, and some of the CD exclusives are so louche they might be parodies of album-oriented rock.

“Where It’s At” opens a dark and perfumed world of sexual intrigue, painted in purplish downtempo hues and laced with wordless coos and eerie backmasking effects. “Lady Democracy” teases a sample so beautiful it’s almost orgasmic once allowed to play out in full. Would it surprise you if I told you it came from “You Don’t Fool Me,” an MOR ballad posthumously Frankensteined from a Freddie Mercury vocal and allowed to pass for Queen on a posthumous 1995 album called Made in Heaven? Stripped of the zombie Mercury, the backing track regains some of its latent dignity.

“To some extent, you sample out of reverence,” Voigt said. “You find something great, you want to connect to it and preserve it, add something—or maybe take something little away that you do not like.” You can understand why Voigt was so taken with the Field, the Swedish producer whose taste in samples tended towards lite-rock filler by Lionel Richie and Coldplay, and whose 2007 debut From Here We Go Sublime would be one of Kompakt’s biggest indie crossover successes. Or with DJ Koze, who started out in rap groups and approaches sampling with the gusto of a hip-hop crate digger.

The idea of a dance album sounding like soft rock was still novel in 1996, when electronic dance music’s allegiance to rock history mostly manifested in labored parallels between the First and Second Summers of Love and their respective lovey-dovey drug cultures. It wouldn’t be novel for much longer. At the same time Voigt was establishing himself as an album artist, a group of French producers were taking the best parts of their own favorite ’70s rock and disco records and slathering them in filters, spurring a crossover revolution and clearing the way for electronic music to infiltrate the mainstream. These days a lot of dance music sounds like soft rock—you could say Daft Punk set the tone for streaming-era indica disco on an album that, ironically, celebrated the last time major pop albums sounded like labors of love and money.

Nearly half a century removed from the rock-vs.-disco wars, the tendency of dance music and rock to grow towards each other now seems like an inevitable quirk of evolution, from Norwegian space disco finding the middle ground between the extended song forms of dance music and the sprawl of jam bands, to Justice casting themselves as heavy-metal barbarians and making explicit the connection between big-room EDM shows and red-eyed ‘70s arena concerts. Yet few artists have brought those thrills together into one fluid vision quite like Wolfgang Voigt on Life’s a Gas, an album that for 72 minutes sustains the feeling of hearing a great song, then strips the songs away until the feeling is all that’s left.