Wolfgang Voigt

One of the leading techno minimalists of his generation, Wolfgang Voigt combines pop, glam rock, classical harmonies, and literary benchmarks into subtly magnificent sonic landscapes with steadfast four-on-the-floor beats. Based in Cologne, Germany, where he was born in 1961, Voigt began releasing pop-sampling tracks in the early '90s as Mike Ink, the first of some 30 future aliases. The best-known of these, however, would be Gas, an artistic persona inaugurated by an eponymous 1996 album and dedicated to, Voigt says, bringing disco to the forest—and vice versa. Gas albums looped the likes of Wagner and Schoenberg into austere and ethereal environments inspired by Voigt's early woodland wanderings on LSD. Voigt reanimated other aspects of German musical culture as BLEI, beginning with mid-'90s releases incorporating technofied polkas, marches, and brass bands. He eventually released more than 160 albums under various monikers into the 21st century, including 2021's murky yet majestic Gas project Der Lange Marsch (The Long March).