Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wolfgang Voigt's "Gas" project is that Wolfgang Voigt created it. Voigt has released many, many hundreds of tracks under 77 different aliases (33 solo projects and 44 collaborations - I checked!), and while I won't pretend to have listened to all of it, my impression of the stuff I've heard is that it's all defiantly mediocre - boring second-wave techno, barely living up to the worst releases on Voigt's Kompakt label. "Alltag" is an exception; this EP holds its own with the best Gas material, and serves as a sort of coda to the Gas project ("Pop" was released in 2000).

Intrusion has finally been properly identified as Stephen Hitchell, Rod Modell's collaborator on the Echospace imprint. This is his first full-length under the Intrusion moniker, collecting new tracks along with some older ones (which were scattered across 12"s released in 2008). On what one could call the "Echospace label spectrum," this falls on the extreme end of both 'ambient' and 'dub.' There's a particular mood that's hard to describe in words; like a rainy night on a dark, tropical island.

This release from the very busy Rod Modell - by my count he has put out some 13 records in the 2007 calendar year, almost all of them spectacular - is very much along the lines of "Vantage Isle," though in this case we find a series of reinterpretations of one of the best tracks from Modell's now-defunct DeepChord label; an ambient/dub journey named (appropriately enough) "Grandbend." One of the more reggae-influenced selections of Modell's back catalogue, and definitely worth a listen!