Music producer and composer Andris Indans has been an active musician since the late 80s, his project Gas of Latvia is one of the most significant electronic music projects that Latvia has to offer.
Gas of Latvia have recorded and released over 10 studio albums, each of them having a different vibe and sound - swithing it up from drone, noise, IDM to industrial music and techno, but still keeping their signature sound.
And yet again the new album offers a new sound and idea. Putting together the past musical phenomenon similar to Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin's album "I Care Because You Do" with synthlines that sound like from the far future, "Compressor" communicates with the listener using a sound more characteristic to electronic music from the 80s and 90s. But this album is not tended on the past, but really the opposite. Using echoes from the past and combining them with
more modern elements, "Compressor" is Gas of Latvia's comment about the constantly changing and flowing, but also about the disguised totalitarian global information era in which we are living. Compressor - the word itself has been heard in subjects related to gas industry or sound engineering, but in this case it symbolises
acceleration and supersaturated energy charge.
You could say that "Compressor" was made in 10 years, because the
first sketches of the album were drawn up in the early 2000s, but they locked in the "chamber of ideas" up until 2009, when one of the ideas took shape as the track "Press House", which was used as the musical background of artist Katrina Neiburga's light installation in festival "Staro Riga". The rest of the album was recorded during the winter of 2011/2012.
American comedian Steven Wright once said that he believes that in any moment God could come down and stop civilization for speeding. Gas of Latvia feels similarly, but with this dynamic and lively album is asking the listener to charge up, start going even faster and outperform everyone else. This album talks about the future in a very abstract manner - using the voices of the past, possibly this is the only way to do this task successfully.
Rihards Endriksons (Skanu Mezs)