Gas is scarcely a musical innovation. Its predecessors extend to the operatic sampling of Pauline Oliveros, the German prog soundtracks of Popol Vuh and Amon Duul, and the bioacoustic recordings of body rhythms and whale songs. But the scope of Voigt’s work, laid end to end here, does succeed in taking the genre beyond its limits as either popular New Age schlock or left-field, naturalist exotica. It is undeniable that Gas is much more than an “ambient” project for Voigt; there seems to be a strong political component, as if in exposing the very champions of German music to his own sonic landscaping, Voigt is questioning the rootedness of Deutsche identity – if such a thing exists.

Voigt’s meditations bear a striking resemblance to those of Werner Herzog, whose manic ambivalence towards notions of “German-ness” and Heimat (“homeland”) has bordered on insurgency. During a recent screening and discussion session at the New York Public Library, the German auteur posed the rather contentious query, “Was the 20th century a mistake?” and proceeded to indict Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux as the first instance of humanity’s conquest of nature in the guise of technology. The advent of alpinism – often attributed to Petrarch’s desire "to see what so great an elevation had to offer” – is historically situated as part of the epochal break between the Renaissance and the waning medieval period that came before. Although alpinism originated in a Franco-Italian culture whose Roman heritage appealed to a pagan and animist past, the leitmotif of the mountain would become central to the German folk tradition of the Wald (“wilderness”).

Alpinism remains a common thread throughout Herzog and Voigt’s oeuvre, the former in his debt to German Expressionist historian Lotte Eisner, Weimar filmmaker-turned-propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, and megalomaniacal thespian Klaus Kinski; and in the latter, the use of German folk/literary imagery like Zauberberg (“Magic Mountain”), Königsforst (King’s Forest, a dense wood near Cologne) and the operatic tropes of ascension, clearing and scaling that comprise his sonic palette. The images of natural landscapes that festoon Herzog’s films – from Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) to The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) – are a fitting visual counterpart to the kinds of swelling sounds Voigt creates. (Appropriately, Herzog would employ Popol Vuh as composers for five of his films.)

To understand the significance of alpinism as it extends from Petrarch’s climb to 21st century German homeland one must wade through an epic bildungsroman of German history, its romantic roots – in Goethe, Hölderlin and Wagner – and its academic idealism – in Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Central in this tradition was the need to rethink the nature/culture bipole and man’s role in determining both through concept, will and technology. The forest, the mountains, and even the hearth became potent political signifiers as nature and culture became inextricably connected with a German identity of strength and sacrifice. Its 20th century result, alluded to in Herzog’s ambitious reassessment, was an ideology that was pulled between two extreme poles – the unilateral spirit of Gemeinschaften and National Socialism or the return to the regional harmonies of the Naturlandschaften.

It is little wonder that most critical attention is paid to Zauberberg and Königsforst, the darkest and most topographic (and so for Voigt, the most political) albums in the collection. Pure tonal exercises without the occasional flourishes of keyboard melody or repeated figures that often appear in Eno or Popol Vuh, Gas’ undulating soundscapes nonetheless remain akin to '70s prog.

Compared to the increasingly technologized minimalism of Austrian/German contemporaries Markus Popp, Christian Fennesz, and Ulrich Schnauss, Voigt’s production is less crystalline and fractal, emphasizing an organic and lateral spaciousness for the scientific and vertical periodicity of the others. With his operatic pretensions, Voigt refuses to become a sound fetishist – the majesty of the mountain’s summit or forest floor must retain its epos. If there is a millennial corollary to much of Zauberberg and Königsforst, it is in the turntablist – Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer are the most obvious comparisons – who accentuates flow, irreducibility and plunderphonics.

This does not, however, reduce the self-titled debut or Pop to incidental bookends. While Gas (1996) exhibits the most conventional IDM production, with recurring cosmic nods to the Eno/Fripp collaboration, Pop is the brightest of the group, with slightly more discernible instrumentation and much less of the menacing bass drum. By retreating from the more sinister amalgam of opera and epic landscape, Pop indicates that Voigt had reached a similar conclusion as did Petrarch upon the summit of Ventoux – “I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.”

In addition to Nah und Fern, Voigt has published an accompanying photography book called Gas:Loops (Raster-Noton) with a CD of unreleased material. Taken together, this massive surplus of Gas will certainly be one of the most important electronic releases of the year, if not the decade.