Connoisseurs of minimalist electronic music may fondly reflect on Wolfgang Voigt’s accomplishments during the 1990s as his artistic peak. Still, the Kompakt label co-founder is hardly finished with the GAS moniker. With 2017’s Narkopop, 2019’s Rausch, and now 2021’s Der Lange Marsch, Voigt has thoroughly proven that there are just as many classical music samples to plunder, soft beats to administer, and ambience haze to disperse as there was before.
True to GAS form, Der Lange Marsch takes a theme and threads it through a series of numerically titled movements reflecting the album’s title. Also true to GAS tradition, the results can be stupefyingly breathtaking in their simplicity. No one can string a loop quite like Voigt, and Der Lange Marsch, like its predecessors, is no exception.
A simple bass drum beat guides the entirety of Der Lange Marsch. Patterns come and go, sounds rise and fall, but the bass drum is constant. The bass note that appears between each beat is so low that it barely registers as a tone, but it can be felt all the same. Der Lange Marsch’s press release likens the ever-evolving music to a journey through an “imaginary forest”; the finer details may change, but the path itself does not. Wander into a forest long enough, and you may lose track of both time and geographic and perspective: “Way. Destination. Loop, Forest loop. No beginning. No end.” It doesn’t sound creepy at all, now does it?
The pulsing drum doesn’t get the album started. First, the listener gets to bask in a warm ambient glow for close to two minutes. The beat gradually fades in, as does the music itself, mixed in with a bit of light static. With these volume surges come gentle flanges and an ever-so gradual shift in tonality. The stage is now set for the second movement, restoring the harmonic order with a simple two-note pattern draped on top that masterfully merges with more mid-range inner workings. The remainder of Der Lange Marsch could rest here, and that would be just fine, but that’s obviously not how these things tend to go.
The deeper the listener strays into the Der Lange Marsch forest, the more sinister things become. The canopy thickens in the third movement, forecasting turbulent samples that cry out for resolution in the fourth. The classical guitar and orchestra call-and-response in the following track only intensify the tension even more. At this point, we’re not even halfway through the album, but the ever pulsing bass drum continues to throb away, turning from guiding light to potential earache.
It is somewhere around the album’s halfway point when the orchestra and organ samples elbow their way to the front of the mix, demanding your attention so that you could be disturbed just a little extra. This is where our fun little forest takes a detour through swamp territory, occasionally swapping hushed dynamics with increasingly foreboding passages. It’s right around the eighth movement when sunnier sounds are re-introduced with a heavy dose of stress, handing the listener a new lease on an album that rewards careful listening with exhaustion.
The penultimate movement lasts for over ten minutes, and the final one just over seven. So if you want to make it to that clearing, you’re going to have to work for it. You need to brush your way past Ligeti-esque vocals, sustained minor chords coming from an organ, and synth-tinged sunlight working just as hard to penetrate the thicket as you are to escape it. But as those bright rays of hope increase in volume, you realize; oh no, Kompakt’s press kit told me that this forest is everlasting. No beginning, no end. Am I here for good, whether I like it or not? As the bass drum fades out completely, the crackling static that started this whole affair accompanies a dying pulse of a synthesizer. From here, you are released from the forest – or trapped in it forever. It’s difficult to know which.
Right now, I’m tempted to say something along the lines of “they just don’t make them like this anymore”. But did the proverbial artistic community known as “they” ever make something so simultaneously beautiful, hypnotizing, and maddening on a regular basis? The constant push and pull behind Der Lange Marsch can be a frightening thing, but it doesn’t have to be that and only that. It can also be absorbed as an album of excellent impressionist achievement, worthy of the GAS name. Just be sure to wear long sleeves and leave a crumb trail.