“My father loves music. Wait, as I’m saying this I’m realizing my father loves music as much as he loves sound. It’s my mother who loves music. There’s a huge difference. Let me unpack.”

“There’s the mystique of artists, the unknown, the legend, the fandom, the rituals, and most importantly the sense of wonder that never dies. That’s loving music. Loving music AND sound, well this basically means you aren’t afraid to dissect everything I just mentioned about loving music. The mystique of an artist is great and all, but, what guitar pedal got him to sound that good? Or, what studio did they record in, what mic did they use?

My father built his own home sound system. Between teaching music, running sound for multiple events, playing in bands (he still plays in one), and making sure that I didn’t break anything, he devoted his life to that one thing we all hunt—the perfect home stereo. And, as I’m sure you’ve probably put together, it was my mother who had quite the heavy hand in the vinyl we purchased for our home listening.

All of these things considered I’m sure you can imagine the reality of me being just buried in music as a child. Almost every photo of me growing up is by the turntable or wearing headphones. I was enamored with vinyl. Its size alone could swallow 8 cassettes or possibly 4 of the “new best thing—the compact disc.”

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Disco, that bugbear of close-minded rock purists (including yours truly, I’m sorry to admit) everywhere, was perhaps the biggest cultural phenomenon to come along since the Beatles. One minute the earth was turning around the sun, and the next it was turning around a disco glitter ball that cast shafts of multi-colored light over a brave new world, one where people in all-white suits with foot-long lapels did dances like the Hustle to a music that combined elements of funk, soul, pop, and salsa. And who were the kings of this new and whirling universe? Why, that would be the Bee Gees, they of the thick chest pelts and positively impossible vocal ranges.

Disco Mania reached its apotheosis with the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, which in addition to turning John Travolta into a superstar expanded the audience for the dance-based genre beyond its pioneering gay, African-American, and Latino bases. Saturday Night Fever became Thee Official Soundtrack of disco people of all colors and sexual orientations everywhere, as its 15x platinum certification amply demonstrates. The double LP featured 6 contributions by the Bee Gees and 11 contributions by others that ranged from the great (The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno”) to the unspeakable (David Shire’s three mostly orchestral offerings, including “Night on Disco Mountain,” which with a title like that should have been great, but isn’t).

In short, the LP is a mixed affair, short on songs by such disco immortals as Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Hues Corporation, Carl “Kung Fu Fighting” Douglas, Barry White, Van “The Hustle” McCoy, the Jackson 5, and LaBelle, and long on the type of filler (Shire again, along with Ralph McDonald’s “Calypso Breakdown” and Walter Murphy’s abominable “A Fifth of Beethoven”) you often find on soundtrack LPs. I mean, why does the LP include only one song by KC & the Sunshine Band? And where the hell are ABBA? And why, oh why, does Saturday Night Fever include only ONE song by a woman?

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“I have often said I was born in the wrong era. Maybe it’s that we glorify the decades that we weren’t around in based on all the good that came out of them. Maybe it’s the stories we hear from our parents or our grandparents. Maybe it’s the memorabilia, the vintage, the style, the art, that a certain era had to offer.”

“I have always categorized time through what it had to offer me. So the best time, in my mind, is the ’60s and ’70s. It offered up some of the best, most consistent, real art, real music to date. Sure, maybe it’s that it’s very hard to be objective about the present. And a decade only becomes a tangible thing the farther away we get from it… but for whatever reason, I have fully dreamt up what I would have been like had I been born in a time that embraced peace, freedom, and real genuine music.

I relish in the stories I hear from my parents. My mom, running home for lunch in elementary school, having just enough time to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, put on her favourite vinyl, and listen to side A and side B while singing along with her mouth full before heading back to class. My dad, remembering the exact moment he heard The Beatles for the first time on TV, jamming along on the keys to anything and everything he could get his hands on.

Imagine a time where people, kids even, would wait in line at a record store and use their allowance to buy music. To listen to an album as a whole.

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Gas was one of numerous projects undertaken by electronic music innovator and Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt. The venture was extant during a bountiful period for progressive techno, specifically 1995 to 2000, and the half decade provided him ample opportunity to put the full into four full-lengths. Kompakt’s recently released Box collects the second through the fourth of those groundbreaking releases and pairs them with a 1999 12-inch, the contents spread across ten LPs and sequenced onto four compact discs. It can be accurately labeled as a doozy, mainly because the sounds it collects remain so worthwhile.

Studio 1, Grungerman, Love Inc., Dextro NRG, Mike Ink, and M:I:5; that’s just a fraction of the monikers employed by musician-producer Wolfgang Voigt. Residing near the top of that heap of handles is Gas, which likely serves as the apex of his substantial profile. Emerging as a significant portion of the techno field moved increasingly away from the oft-rigid structure of club sounds toward ambient, abstract, and experimental territories, Voight didn’t necessarily reject trad techno ideas in Gas, at first mingling the body-moving impetus with a more forthrightly artistic approach.

Gas debuted in 1995 with the “Modern” 12-inch on Voigt’s own Profan label, a small early ’90s precursor to Kompakt that’s been tagged as pursuing the “meandering side-paths of Techno.” That’s an apt way of describing “Modern,” its four varied tracks bending, stressing, stretching, and unsurprisingly, engaging in repetition.

The following year a self-titled full-length debut arrived not on Profan but Mille Plateaux, the important experimental electronic label responsible for initially releasing the remainder of Gas’ output. Interestingly, when Kompakt issued the first expanded collection of Gas material in 2008, Nah Und Fern included Gas alongside its three full-length counterparts.

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