When music seems as abstract and as disconnected from identifiable semantics as the sparse dronings epics of Gas's Königsforst, visual cues such as the cover art can assume enormous significance. In the case of this particular album, the cover art and inside jacket contain text-free images of a lightly wooded forest submerged in hazy orange tones. This surreal image oddly correlates quite effectively with the haunting sounds of the music found within the album's eerie packaging. With Königsforst, the infamous man of many masks, Wolfgang Voigt, leads the listener down a hallucinogenic path into a haunted aural forest of blurry sounds swirling slowly like leaves swaying in the wind or ghosts hovering in the far distance. The gothic tone of this music's droning horn-like string sounds operates on one's unconscious. The sounds are heard yet extremely intangible and difficult to pinpoint. One cannot name a particular sound with the exception of the occasional deeply buried dub bassline. The altered sounds drone on and on in loops of mesmerizing circles, capable of putting even the most high-strung individual into catatonia. At the end of the journey through Königsforst , one feels as though a dream has just concluded. The listener is left with no salient memories of the music -- no melodies, riffs, rhythms, identifiable sounds, or vocal hooks -- yet a sense of abduction remains, a feeling that one has just been carried away into a phantom-like realm of gaseous invisible creatures only to be abruptly brought back a jarring sense of reality. ~ Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide
