More Light, Less Hocus-Pocus: GAS-RAUSCH (2018)

Eigteenth of Oktember
The night falls
The king comes
The hunt starts

Wolfgang Voigt, Rausch (2018)

GAS is Wolfgang Voigt, co-founder of the legendary electronic music label Kompakt from Cologne, and Rausch (2018) is his masterpiece. On the cover art we see and on the two discs we hear the mythical German forests, birthplace of great sagas and the peak of romanticism. As inspiration for the precious Grimm’s tales that exported eerie German knowledge to an universal consciousness, to this day its being revisited by artists such as Lars von Trier, who will only film in the German forests for the right impact of his unsettling and radical films (f.e. Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011)).

Rausch is a hypnotic mix of ambient and classic with just a hint of techno. Cosmic music that is constantly on the edge to being a nightmare, yet it is strangely far from being otherwordly and keeps a sober and focused composure with a tireless physicality knocking at the pain threshold, which as whole is often reminiscent of Wagner. It should be listened to as a single composition and full symphony, and so it was premiered in the Cologne Philharmonia in the year of its release.

Voigt is taking us to the mythical German forests, but although the album is titled “Rausch“ („intoxication, ecstasy“), it is a not a mystical album celebrating the dreamlike, unconcious state and the vague darkness of vision resulting of that. This ecstasy has another connotation, it is an endless and relentless march through deadwood and undergrowth ornated with thorns, an hour-long voyage through these misty Teutonic forests, a record that brings together all senses by that it makes you feel the moss, hear the crack of wood under your steps, and smell the fog and rot. On the album’s artwork we see forests and trees where the sunshine gleams trough- Rausch is a testament to the horrors of the daylight which does without cheap effects like the full moon and wolf howls at night.

This forest here is mythically charged and sinister, but otherwise captivates through the absence of mythical and magical creatures, through its abstract realism. An analogy to the Grimm Brothers is ideally suited to work out the outstanding quality of Rausch: more revelation through light, and light’s closeness to the cosmic beat.

Curated and disneyfied by the cultural makers of the modern world, the original Grimm’s tales bear sinister truths that go beyond cartoonized princesses, wolves, and witches. They also go beyond the categorization of archetypes and psychoanalytical interpretation, which too often obscures more than it reveals due to its narrow theoretical and hypothetical nature. At the core of these tales which were kept alive (but also embellished, changed, and decoded) by the oral tradition, often true events are to be found.

A good example is Bluebeard (1812), which is the tale of a wealthy and powerful nobleman who has been married several times to women who have all mysteriously vanished. He gives his newest beautiful bride the keys to his huge castle, allowing her to explore any room, except for an underground chamber that he strictly forbids her to enter. Of course she enters it nevertheless, and discovers a blood-flooded room full of female corpses hanging from hooks on the wall and ceiling. She tries to cover up her actions and clean the the key which has dropped into the blood, but the key is magical and the blood cannot be removed, revealing her disobidience to her beastly husband.

Over the years, the interpretations of this chilling tale concentrated on gender questions and sexuality. The Christian reading emphasizes on allusions to the biblical story of man’s fall and the role of Eve / women as scapegoats for the origin of evil in Western civilization. The feminist perspective claims that it is a story about domestic violence and victimhood of women. The Freudian interpretation, most prominently carried out by Bruno Bettelheim, suggests that the forbidden room is symbolic for the unlocking of sexual desires, with the bloody key being a phallic symbol. All of this is valid and true – at the same time, none of it is valid and true, but almost harmful, since it entirely takes the focus away from the true story.

Bluebeard was initially written down in 1697 by Charles Perrault, who was also the true author of many other folk tales like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Sleeping Beauty. Perrault’s Barbe Bleue is directly inspired by a true historical figure, Baron Gilles de Rais. Baron de Rais was a very wealthy French nobleman and war hero as Marshal of France during the Hundred Years’ War, where he fought besides Jeanne D’Arc. He was a saint-like man concerned with religion and his own salvation, a man who financed the construction of chapels. He was also the satanist torturer and killer of approximately more than 400 children.

His first victim was a peasant boy. He strangled the child and cut off his hands. Then he tore his eyes and heart out. He used the flowing blood as ink to write occult texts. There was no stopping after this murder. Having given himself to decadence, alchemy and the occult, Gilles de Rais kidnapped hundreds of children whereever he and his servants appeared, and then raped, tortured, and ritually murdered them in his underground chambers. His wife left him in horror, but kept silent about the crimes. Soon, the people figured out the identity of the beast who made the countless children disappear, but the families of the victims were restrained by fear and low social status from taking action against him- Gilles de Rais had the best relations to authorities and the clerics. But the people did their part in keeping the remembrance of the horrible crimes alive as oral tales though, which eventually ended up in different variations of the Bluebeard tale 250 years later.

At the sixth day of his trial in 1440, Gilles confessed and spoke almost non-stop while cynically describing his murders in detail, re-living them almost joyfully. In the end he was executed. Two interesting things happened to the figure of the satanic Baron: De Rais had been contrite and composed in the face of execution, asking for God’s forgiveness, which brought him posthumous acclaim as a model of Christian penitence; excessive prayers for his soul and a three-day fast bordering on worship was observed after his death. And even more interestingly: despite the overwhelming evidence and his confessions, Gilles de Rais got depicted as innocent victim of the inquisition by some revisionists, paradoxically because of his satanism. And also our occult pop-star Aleisteir Crowley described de Rais as “in almost every respect… the male equivalent of Joan of Arc”, whose main crime was “the pursuit of knowledge“. Indeed by now, all the blooming real satanism and witchcult of the Middle Ages, often -because necessarily- practised by priests, seem to have been discredited and moved to the land of sagas and fairytales by same clerics and their very own ‘Holy Inquisition’.

But back to the echo of German forests in Wolfgang Voigt’s Rausch: like the historical reading of the Bluebeard story, it references the core of things and that what is, renouncing suggestion and deception, rejecting chaos amidst the thicket. It is the celebration and ecstasy of the clear conscience, a low-frequency horror only daylight can provide because of our sensory overload with nocturnal hocus-pocus and interpretation. Alternate perspectives on reality that with every closer inspection and illumination reveal themselves as escapism from truth more or less. Intruiging nightmares that put us to sleep like the incubus* that hides in the word ‘nightmare’. More light, less darkness, and darkness in the light – it is the horrors of the day, of what is really out there we should be examining, open-eyed.

by Saliha Enzenauer

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*nightmare (n.) ca. 1300

Middle English (denoting a female evil spirit thought to lie upon and suffocate sleepers): from night + Old English mære ‘incubus’.

An incubus is a demon in male form who, according to mythological and legendary traditions, lies upon sleeping women in order to engage in sexual activity with them. Its female counterpart is a succubus.