wolfgang voigt: ruckverzauberung 10/nationalpark

In celebration of the opening of German national park Hunsrück-Hochwald, Wolfgang Voigt has conceived an abstract, ambient-infused sound installation which can be experienced as a kind of "acoustic hike through the forest," thanks to a series of loudspeakers allocated in a natural environment. This approximately hour-long piece of music is a freeform improvisation on a classic sonic scenario made of strings and winds, processed with electronic means. The rather elegiac billows of sound flow into each other and part again, like a musical early morning fog in a "reverse-enchanted" woodland. They weightlessly trek alongside auspicious shadows of atonality, across gentle hills and valleys, through gleaming clearings into eternity. The visual equivalent to this fantasy can be found on the CD cover, by way of a hypnotically focused view of a forest and its intricacies -- harkening back to Voigt's Gas concept series and the '90s albums Königsforst, Zauberberg, and Pop. As with Gas, both the music and the visual design of Rückverzauberung 10/Nationalpark formalize an essentially Voigtian simultaneity of an idea of romanticism based on nature-induced rapture and an approach to the beauty of surfaces trained by pop art. Nationalpark is the tenth part of the open concept series Rückverzauberung.