For the opening concert of the 10th edition of the CTM festival Wolfgang Voigt, influential electronic music artist of world acclaim and founder of the renowned Kompakt label, performs his legendary ambient project GAS live.
Voigt presents GAS in the form of a specially conceived audio-visual performance, created in collaboration with video artist Petra Hollenbach. In conjunction with a stream of hypnotic images derived from Voigt’s own photography, GAS live takes the audience on a metaphysical journey through the German forrest and its ambivalent mythological inventory – a riveting trip, somewhere between acid rave and archaic Natural Romanticism.
With his four GAS albums, released between 1996 and 2000, Voigt created a new, previously unheard musical aesthetic: sounds inspired by German romantic music are interwoven into fluid, ephemeral stuctures that evoke transient spaces and plunge the listener into an ecstatic experience. In 2008 Kompakt re-released all four groundbreaking albums in a CD-box. At the same time Raster-Noton published a book that presents the visual aspect of the comprehensive GAS project with a selection of Voigt's photography, that also serves as base material for the visual concept of the GAS live show.
The concert is one of Voigt's very few live appearances after 12 years of abstinence while he focussed on developing Kompakt as an important hub for independent electronic music. Wolfgang Voigt’s work was formative for the techno movement in the early and mid 90s and the broad range of electronic musicians that followed. Voigt’s work within the labels Kompakt and Profan stands for the careful and successful balancing of artists' need for independence, a critical view on zeitgeist and the necessity of economic efficiency.
With Wolfgang Voigt the 10th edition of CTM will be inaugurated by an artist who not only helped spearhead the musical development of the past two decades, but who continues to seek ways and means to face the challenges of the ongoing transformation of independent music culture.
> www.kompakt.fm
