A year after Wolfgang Voigt's revered ambient techno project Gas made its triumphant return with the excellent 2017 full-length Narkopop, he released the next installment, Rausch. This album is a single hourlong composition meant to be listened to in one sitting, and is only broken up into seven CD tracks for convenience, or four LP sides out of necessity. The album majestically unfolds, but is never in a hurry to go anywhere, and inhabits the familiar type of forest-like dream world listeners have come to expect. If there ...
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A year after Wolfgang Voigt's revered ambient techno project Gas made its triumphant return with the excellent 2017 full-length Narkopop, he released the next installment, Rausch. This album is a single hourlong composition meant to be listened to in one sitting, and is only broken up into seven CD tracks for convenience, or four LP sides out of necessity. The album majestically unfolds, but is never in a hurry to go anywhere, and inhabits the familiar type of forest-like dream world listeners have come to expect. If there are any distinguishing characteristics to this one, it seems a tinge darker than other Gas releases, as well as a bit clearer and more airy, at least for some moments. The beatless opening portion feels like a slowly vibrating orb of light with a few streaks of distortion that nearly resemble sunspots. A steady beat hazily trudges in, and becomes surrounded by trippy flutes, reversed flickers, ripples of tense strings, and other sounds familiar to the Gas universe. By the album's midsection, it starts to seem sludgier but not necessarily heavier, with a hollowed-out disco beat playing at half speed and traces of delicate strings and autumnal woodwinds gently floating upward. After a particularly tense stretch, the album seems to calm down by the end, revisiting the trudging beats and vaporous puffs of sound. The continuous-play format suits the album well, as it's much easier to get lost inside without the gaps between tracks. While Rausch initially doesn't feel like quite as much of a momentous occasion as Narkopop did when it first arrived, it certainly isn't any less beautiful, and holds up to repeated listens as well as anything else in the project's essential discography. ~ Paul Simpson, Rovi
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