GENRE: Electronic 

LABEL: Force Inc

REVIEWED: 12 October, 2025

RATING: 8.5/10

Wolfgang Voigt’s 1996 Love Inc. album Life’s a Gas is a beguiling collision of club machinery and pop memory—part acid/ambient techno, part sample-driven collage that still sounds like an oddball classic. Released on Force Inc., the record stretches over an hour and alternates blunt, dancefloor-ready cuts with long, almost cinematic pieces that treat familiar pop fragments as material to be worn down and reimagined. 

What makes the album compelling is Voigt’s willingness to let sources show through rather than hide them: T. Rex and Roxy Music fragments surface, but they’re refracted through repetitive drum patterns, patient synth washes, and pitch-shifted loops that push the samples toward something ghostly. The title track—an extended, hypnotic reconception of Bolan’s phrase serves as the album’s emotional fulcrum, dissolving song into atmosphere across nearly fifteen minutes. 

Sonically, Life’s a Gas balances minimal techno precision (see TB-303-tinged workouts like “T.R.I.B.U.T.E.”) with lush, almost soft-rock textures on CD-only pieces, so the listening experience flips between the body and the head. The vinyl edition leans more explicitly toward dancefloor functionality, while the extended CD offers those looser, album-oriented passages. 

Because Voigt’s sampling is so prominent, the record has been less visible on streaming platforms, which has helped it acquire a cult aura among collectors—copies turn up on Discogs and specialty shops and are often described as a hidden high point of ’90s Cologne techno. Contemporary writeups have also framed it as a connective tissue between rave culture and later ambient/pop experiments in Voigt’s oeuvre. 

If you approach Life’s a Gas expecting tidy genre labels you’ll be surprised; if you surrender to its patient loops and sly pop archaeology, you’ll find an album that’s playful, melancholic, and quietly influential a record that rewards repeated listens and close attention.