Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Rückverzauberung im Tunnel by Wolfgang Voigt (Astral Industries)
Album? Song? A Sound Experience? Yes! World-weaving madman, erupting from his pseudonym-ladened studio with no greater name than his own, Wolfgang Voigt lights the way, offering a kindly push into the 50-minute-long tumble that is Rückverzauberung im Tunnel.
Let’s break down the German here for a better idea of what we’ve got in store. First, “rückverzauberung” translates to “reverse enchantment,” “tunnel” means tunnel, and it just so happens to describe the space that the reverse enchantment is im. Second, Wolfgang Voigt is the flesh and blood name of projects such as C.K. Decker, Mike Ink, Dieter Gorney, Wasserman, and literally like – 30 other aliases. Best known for his work as Gas and co-owner of German independent record label Kompakt, here he offers up something like the raw elements that are sewn into his many other projects. Foregoing the thumping subterranean bass drum of Gas, but opting to keep the spirit of the endless pedway alive, knowing just how to graft the sense of motion on a catalog of drones.
This is in keeping with the aesthetic set forth by the fantastic Astral Industries record label (also check out the gorgeous album art for their releases, all done by Theo Ellsworth). Makers of some of my favorite late night records, where teetering on the edge of sleep is a form of self-hypnosis, priming the mind for transport through a kaleidoscope of sounds. For examples, please hear: Waveform Transmission, The Chi Factory, Shorelights, and LF-58.
While these aforementioned records may fall vaguely into the ambient category, Rückverzauberung defies such a soft designation. To be sure, the drone is a crucial backbone to the structure of this piece, but one can’t expect to just pop this on for a quick session of yoga. Right from the start, the sound rising out of silence is less musical and more like a swarm of helicopters passing above your home. Filters and phasers doing their trick, lending movement and space to static tones. Keeping the tunnel fixed in your mind, eyes closed—because passive listening will likely leave you unimpressed, the sound will begin to dislodge you from your (mentally) seated position.
Deep foundational tones provide the sensation of movement, and as they carry us along we can hear the odd ornamentations that adorn each particular stretch of the Always Hallway. Chimes jangle, there’s a few minutes that sound like a string section warming up, further drones sneak in and (mis)align themselves with each other. These musical oddments are often obscured, hidden, or buried beneath the endless motion of the drone, but lean an ear close enough and you can detect these fine textures as you pass through the Corridor Forevermore—idor.
This is where the raw material of WV’s other work can be heard. There are the Robotussen’d loops of classical music, elongated into spectral smears that we are all familiar with from Gas. Indeed, the barber pole shape of the music finds the listener suspended, lost, adrift, and guided all at once. This notion connects back to experiences Voigt has talked about, and found voice for in his music. His acid trips in Germany’s Königforst, a sort of legend behind the animating influence for Voigt’s work as Gas, are just as present in the spirit of the sounds on Rückverzauberung. The darkness and the endless visions blooming from the wholly repetitive landscape and its infinitely diverse vegetation, each tree lapsing from the anonymous ubiquity of the forest into the realm of the individually observable—these elements were plucked from the wilderness but their organic essence finds itself synthetically reinterpreted on im Tunnel.
Farming by Ted Hearne & The Crossing (Deathbomb Arc)
This record was passed to me by our wonderful helmsman of Off Shelf, David Obenour. It’s something I may have panned if I came across it organically, but I decided to give it the time required to properly grok it. What I found most difficult is that I can rarely tolerate choral performances. It reminds me of church, and playing at heaven. It’s my own damn bias, but it usually rolls quite sourly off my ears. Despite this foolish musical bigotry, I found my way in. The Crossing’s (the choir) performance is brilliant of course, but the way the vocal performance interacts with the album’s subject matter is what ultimately drew me further into the album.
On Farming the pressing and frequently obfuscated concerns of our modern life are transmuted into song. Every intrusion on our daily humanity, sick from it, exhausted by it, physical and mental functions rewired, we open our lives and invite it in – again. Each phone alert, the unending deluge of targeted marketing, news, legal jargon, entertainment, and digital fluff all refracted through a prism, fucked into our skull, riding a wave of tooth-achingly high definition colors, purpose-built for extracting matrices of our organism’s appetites and follies.
Across the album, it is the choral voices that seem to imply the miraculous nature of our technology, or is this what my religious trauma brings to mind? We each see our world through the filter of the phone or the screen, and the choir’s constant onslaught is the same ubiquitous voice of this very god we carry in our pockets.
With these legion voices as narrator, we explore—and often quite humorously, the world of global capitalism and the plight of our sensorium, if not our psyche. It’s an album worth listening to while simultaneously reading the lyrics. The voice of god is often hard to decipher, and all the songs merit revisiting. The music behind the ever-present voice is constantly shifting. Genres pass from one to the next with the ease of thumbing along a feed. This isn’t just occurring song to song, but moment to moment. So the listener is pulled hither and yon while the song seems to pursue itself across every possible landscape. “Country” stands as a wonderful demonstration of this method.
Despite all my mentions of technology’s cold hands on this record, the warmth of humanity finds ways to shine through. On “Gift Economy” a monochrome vocoder choir encyclopedically describes the Native American people, briefs about their values, diet, physiognomy, spirit. A soloist steps aside from the vocoder to deliver some thoughts on the word “gifts,” taking the long way around so the listener can almost lose the weight of the word, gift, on their mind’s tongue. Abstracted through repetition into just another sound (gift), meeting an abstract about a destroyed people. Somehow this contrast urges onward the song’s quiet bloom, into the humanity that the aesthetic and the content would at first seem to eschew.
Farming is satisfying in that -with patience, it will do the work of any good album and teach you how to listen to it. The moment when it clicks, and everything falls into place is fantastic, and it’s a sensation you know you’ll try to chase down again, always coming up short. Fortunately for you, listener, these songs can be evasive. Though they may outpace you at times, they won’t outrun your efforts. Soon you’ll find yourself, somehow, on the verge of tears listening to a choir recite the details from a government website about obtaining foreign nationals for temporary agriculture work in the USA.
Honorable Mentions
Magnetism by Kali Malone & Drew McDowall (Ideologic Organ)
This collaboration makes so much sense. For all the notions I held prior to actually hearing the record, pondering the possible outcomes, it makes sense to take the artists’ names at face value. I say this as a compliment. Malone’s tunings and song structures meld perfectly with the sonic palette Drew McDowall is known for.
Operating within an extremely limited canvas of sounds and processes, we have a voice that unifies the five songs. Relying heavily on karplus-strong synthesis (read as: it sounds like strings or struck objects) and only a few effects such as distortion, maybe a spring reverb, the duo create a heavy atmosphere. To this same end, the songs are incredibly patient. Every note plucked, rings out with a resonant hum. The sustain hangs taut in the air, undulating in the dust, then slashed through by the next note, whenever it is that may arrive.
It’s much more than a drone album, though that may be the impression it gives upon first listen. There is a power intrinsic in the music. As each note is strained to its limits, as one note fades and the next arrives, the space is still ripe with the sounds that have come before. The effect is similar to sacred geometry. The repetition of simple forms, placed deliberately, yield complex results.
Lizard (2025 David Singleton Elemental Mix) by King Crimson (DGM)
Even though this record was originally released in 1970, the new mixes by David Singleton completely change the aesthetics of the record. The original version of Lizard is hands down my favorite King Crimson record, and what I imagined would be a cursory listen to the frequently-dull remixes of a well known classic album, actually turned into repeat listening.
It’s not that Lizard originally sounded like a rock album, but Mr. Singleton does away with whatever isms remain and recontextualizes the music by pruning away some of the bombast. Minimizing the overall dynamic range of the record, not a-la compression, but by redirecting the energy of the performances to better highlight the meticulous construction of the songs. A mix more respectful to the constituent parts.
It’s not just the overall volume of the songs, but much of the instrumentation that found itself buried behind further instrumentation is now parsed out tastefully. The musical repetition inherent in the songs allows the recurrence of each verse/chorus to be dramatically reimagined from one to another. See, “Indoor Games” for a concise demonstration of this method.
Indeed, Elemental Mix seems a perfect designation for the results. Sitting in the mixing chair, it wouldn’t be my first inclination to dial back Robert Fripp’s guitar on a King Crimson record, but this counterintuitive approach yields an entirely different record. I won’t say that it has dethroned the 1970 record in my heart (yet), but it is certainly a record I plan on shelving right next to the original.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
1979 by μ-Ziq (Balmat)
Cloud Time by Emily A. Sprague (RVNG Intl.)
DOGA by Juana Molina (Sonamos)
Iconoclasts by Ann von Hauswolff (YEAR0001)
Forces, Reactions, Deflections by Scanner (quiet details)
Goodness by feeo (AD93)
Live at RRR by EXEK (self-released)
Curiosities from the Shift by Joe Westerlund (Psychic Hotline)
ARCHENFIELD by U (Lex Records)
Perseverance Flow by Natural Information Society (eremite records)
Floating by LAVVENDAH (self-released)