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viewing 1 To 17 of 17 items
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12"
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PROFAN 040EP
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Apodiktische Gewissheit ("apodeictic certainty") is the title of a cooperative audio-visual project from Berlin-based artist Gerhard Mantz and Wolfgang Voigt. The project is premised on a digital video piece from Gerhard Mantz. Steadily flowing geometric forms and themes move evenly around a fixed center towards the viewer. A hypnotic undertow-like effect of seductive beauty emerges - impossible to elude. Wolfgang Voigt seizes on the digital aesthetic and the mechanical flow of the images, giving them a musical equivalent. The result is a successful amalgamation of imagery and music that generates maximum intensity with minimum motion.
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CD
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PROFAN 016CD
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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.
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CD
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PROFAN 015CD
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In 1993, Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt established the iconic fringe imprint Profan to provide his own idiosyncratic ideas of techno music with an uncensored, liberal publishing platform. From the very beginning, the label stood for a rampant love of experimentation and Voigt's unruly urge to habitually plough through new -- and for the most part difficult -- musical territory with a straight bass drum. Driven by incessant transgression of boundaries and genres, Voigt ransacks schlager and polka, classical and pop styles, sampling his way across music history. Since 2009, Voigt has focused on increasingly abstract and creatively elaborate art and music releases on Profan, which led him to launch the Profan sub-label Protest in 2010, where the expressionist pop techno 12" single á la Voigt has found sort of a second home, heavily informed by his paradigm of sex, drugs, and pop art. Originally only available on strictly limited vinyl, a selection of remastered Protest tracks has now found its way onto CD, with two previously unreleased bonus cuts. The compilation Protest - Versammlung 1 provides a representative overview of the current state of Cologne techno, indulging in the gaudy funkyness of one of its masters and pioneers.
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12"
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PROFAN 039EP
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"Stoicism" (German: "Stoa") is one of the most influential philosophical schools in Western civilization. An essential property of stoic philosophy is the cosmological perspective on a holistic experience of the world, resulting in a universal principle that prevails in all natural phenomena and correlations. The stoic individual is mostly concerned with recognizing and occupying his place in this order -- he does so by embracing his fate through the stoic practice of emotional self-restraint, striving for wisdom by means of serenity and tranquility.
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CD
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PROFAN 014CD
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A fanfare of cautious grandeur rings out as if it were the opening for indeterminate festivities, only to be immediately reflected by itself. In ever new mirrors. In the hall of mirrors. The room inside a room inside a room. Time is a very elastic concept. Narcotic brass loops, almost imperceptibly modulating, reel towards infinity. A '70s Kraut electronics sequencer feeling coquets with James Last's muzak sound and Cheb musicians on Valium. Stoic, infinite, limp. Programmatic boredom as rhetorical device of befuddled bliss. Only the occasional cloud of atonality suggests the abyss behind the blue skies of (pop)ambientish other-worldliness. Limited pressing of 500 copies.
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12"
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PROFAN 038EP
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Freiland, alongside Sog, is and was one of Wolfgang Voigt's most important projects. For his Z.O.M. mix of "Rot 2," Voigt enveloped it in an almost club-like, warm groove coat. "Rot 3," the mother of all shaffel bombs comes dressed in a gaffel mix, meaning: gabber meets schaffel (shuffle). The musical alter-ego of painter Albert Oehlen Wendy Gondeln uses aggressive, abstract violin sounds in real time for his remix of "Rot 4" while Michael Mayer's confident dancefloor-style provides insight into "Gelb 3."
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12" + CD
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PROFAN 037EP
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In the beginning God created the bass drum. He had it beat for 8,601 days. Then he dropped it. The greatest work of art is death, said the almighty God. And that one is expensive. Finite. Infinite. That's politics and sciences and arts. The art of omission. The art of refusal. Death is total. Do you want the total bass-drum?
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12"
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PROFAN 036EP
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Originally the B-side to Rückverzauberung 2, "Du Musst Nichts Sagen" marched towards a dark fortress, following a point-blank trail and inspired by the mute grit of the many. The remixes present three distinct alternatives, starting with the "Fanfaren Mix" that cranks up the amount of fanfare, the "Informel Mix," created as the soundtrack for an experimental video (http://youtu.be/49_-S5nWdMI) and the "Doppelvoigt Mix" which takes an interview given by Wolfgang Voigt and translates it into some sort of document of techno both abstract and humoristic.
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CD
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PROFAN 010CD
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For Wolfgang Voigt, techno is a means of constantly reinventing himself. After the publication of the highly idiosyncratic Freiland Klaviermusik (PROFAN 009CD), the two Sog records Abweichung and Fremde Hände, and Du Musst Nichts Sagen, on Profan, his new album Kafkatrax is dedicated to the human voice. As in previous projects, Voigt is solely interested in the sound and the structure of the original material -- in this case, recited text. Using various cutting and covering techniques, he disassembles the text into a disturbing, abstract "literature rap" that at best creates an illusion of comprehending fragments of the shredded words and sentences left over. In combination with Voigt's typical Umta techno beat, the outcome is a kind of vocal polka consisting of voices and their side acoustics that sound like psychedelic without guitars or acid without 303. The fact that Voigt used a Kafka audio book CD, reminiscent of his literary preferences as a teenager, is entirely meaningless to the final musical product -- Voigt is only interested in the sound of recited vocal text. He could have equally used Thomas Mann or the Grimm Brothers. What is interesting, however, is that by covering and layering the voices across up to 5 octaves, a claustrophobic, nightmarish atmosphere is created that can definitely be described as Kafkaesque.
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12"
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PROFAN 035EP
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Following the legendary first two, stoically super-minimal records, Profan presents Fremde Hände. The A-side contains a tonally noncommittal sequence ambling across the keyboard in quantized form, reminiscent of the arpeggiator (accompaniment function) function of early '70s and '80s synthesizers. On the B-side, daring and thoroughly unquantized quaver rhythms rock around a bass drum that, as the only straight element, tries to keep the whole thing together. The result sounds a little like a delirious Can live.
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12"
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PROFAN 034EP
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Another eagerly-anticipated 12" from Wolfgang Voigt's newly-revived Profan label. Including part two of an exclusive track released on the Pop Ambient 2011 compilation (KOMP 087CD/KOM 223LP) that sonically describes the Profan concept. Gas-eous harmony that glows and leaves you wanting more.
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12"
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PROFAN 033EP
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Profan presents the original version of Wolfgang Voigt's hypnotic minimal track "Verwandlung" as well as "Geduld" from the album Freiland Klaviermusik (PROFAN 009CD). DJ Koze has created an incomparable remix that has the potential to make this track a massive floor-filler, and in doing so, he has effectively integrated all of the relevant and original piano parts of the track.
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CD
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PROFAN 009CD
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If experimental minimalistic dance music as we know it today had existed during the lifetime of Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, it might have sounded much like this present album. Something fascinating and possibly well known, is that Kompakt label founder Wolfgang Voigt has a fondness for historical music like this. Freiland-Klaviermusik stays true to this idea, maintaining its focus on music composed for the piano, but composed with a very different approach. It's once again Voigt's effort to find a musical structure that eliminates the boundary between freely-improvised "virtuosic" music and fine-incremental sequencing of a computer matrix. In Voigt's Freiland project there is one underlying theme; one single sound varied in many different ways surrounding the main idea of minimal-techno music: the four-to-the floor bass drum. In this case, it's a synthetic piano, which moves between rhythmic and abstract, between deliberateness and coincidence, within a somewhat predefined structure. Sometimes the clock of the bass drum does not accompany its presence at all. The present aesthetics of atonal, sometimes Kafka-esque and early 20th century classical music are rather a "pleasant by-product" than an authentic classical-music statement. Blasting borders and breaking rules to create apparently new revelations has always been Voigt's drive. Apart from his timeless preference to adopt different musical styles such as classical-music, jazz, schlager or brass music into his own music, in this case, Voigt's encounter with the music of composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) was an important influence. In Nancarrow's work, Voigt found strong parallels to his own; the search for unpredictability and spontaneity, often affecting his way of working, to find a symbiosis between man and machine. This approach has also influenced Voigt's work as a visual artist. The front cover of the record presents an excerpt from one of Voigt's Tetrapak-paintings, in which he covers, combines, and confronts a predetermined mechanical structure (pattern, wallpaper ≙ loop, pattern) with more or less a free, progressive, and rhythmic painting technique. The current releases on Voigt's re-launched '90s label Profan together with the reunion of his music with his lesser-known work as a performing artist represent that in 2010, Voigt sees minimal music through as it relates to minimal art rather than minimal techno. It could also be that Voigt believes that art can express complication and pain in ways that the minimal techno of today cannot.
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12"
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PROFAN 032EP
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2015 repress. Profan (...remember Wolfgang Voigt's abstract techno label from the 1990s) is back from the future. Like his earlier projects, the brand new SOG release combines seemingly familiar and extremely unfamiliar signs, and in the most unusual way bends them around the utterly familiar bass drum. The result is a conspiracy of four sound frescos of peculiar beauty which deserve the title "Abweichung" (trans. "deviance") -- named after Voigt's painting featured on the cover. This is minimal art-techno that raises questions.
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12"
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PROFAN 030EP
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"Freiland Klaviermusik is radical, puristic, uncompromising, elegiac, difficult, defiant, true and absolutely necessary.The record, including art cover designed by Wolfgang Voigt is strictly limited."
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LP
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PROFAN 029LP
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CD
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PROFAN CD5
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"Scarily accurate rendering of contemporary anti-utopia by Reinhard Voigt (aka Sweet Reinhard, etc...). Extremely damaged post-post dancefloor militancy, devoid of ANY pleasure-inducing elements save for the harsh, foreboding THUD of crisp 808 kicks sampled & filtered 10x over. Babelfish says (of Pentax): 'and anti-No. andantino cuts itself a piece of sausage of the finger and feeds thereby its turteltauben dog if the turteltauben dog from birth without hearing is, takes it feeds gratefully against otherwise possibly remembers it at their sight a phonograph record this incommodity can andantino and its turteltauben dog, if this was accustomed to the playplay play, thus save that it inverts the turteltauben dog before feeding the huendische turteltaube is with grains to feed from serious jandl.'" -- Hrvatski. Limited stock.
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