Biography
Portsmouth, U.K., houses Christopher Reeves, the creator of the Gasman’s eerie yet playful electronica. His extensive catalog draws equal inspiration from the U.K. rave and jungle movements alongside classical traditions, resulting in intricate rhythms laden with breakbeats, melodies warped by Baroque sensibilities, and lighthearted nods to the earliest acid house and techno recordings. Throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s Reeves remained a core artist on the Planet Mu roster, issuing no fewer than seven albums that encompassed the spectral experiments of 2003’s Remedial and the ferocious breakcore of 2006’s This One’s for You. After 2010’s Powerpoints, his last outing for that imprint, his output extended from finely detailed piano pieces such as 2012’s Hiding Place and the 2014 follow-up to efforts like 2016’s Aeriform, which evoked ’80s synth pop and house while preserving an unmistakably Gasman identity. The 2018 release Controlled Hallucination arrived as an expansive statement that wove together every facet of his approach.
As a teenager drawn to breakbeat rave, the early work of Aphex Twin, and releases on the Rephlex label, Reeves started producing music on a programmable Yamaha keyboard while sampling from vinyl, cassettes, and radio broadcasts. Certain pieces originated from reel-to-reel classical tapes processed through a computer. By 1998 he had adopted Soundforge and Acid software to construct tracks, eventually shaping a signature approach that fused ornate, Baroque-tinged melodies with fragmented breakbeats enveloped in a luminous, ethereal haze. Planet Mu put out the Gasman’s first album, Remedial, in 2003; label chief Mike Paradinas selected its contents from three demo CDs. A spectral, glitch-laden ambient cut called “Imodium” surfaced on Warp Records’ limited-edition sampler Warpmart Issue 1 and on Planet Mu’s 2004 compilation Children of Mu, later appearing on the Gasman’s second Planet Mu project, the ambitious double album The Grand Electric Palace of Variety, released in 2005. That same year Reeves also appeared on Canada’s Sublight Records via Multiplex and on the U.S. label Terminal Dusk with the breakbeat-driven Hardline EP.
Early in 2006 the Gasman returned to Planet Mu with This One’s for You, whose fractured breakbeats and rave-tinged synth textures surpassed those of prior efforts in density. Later that year came Trueform, his second and final album for Sublight before the label ceased operations in 2007. Three further albums arrived in 2007: Love Collection and Audiogold on Planet Mu plus 001 on his own GasmanMusic imprint. Superlife followed on Planet Mu in 2008, while the more acid-techno-oriented Weak-base Equilibria inaugurated a series of EPs issued by netlabel the Centrifuge. Powerpoints, his seventh Planet Mu album, appeared in 2010.
Thereafter Reeves concentrated on GasmanMusic, releasing under both his established pseudonym and alternate identities including Synthia, Wiggy, and Meatman, as well as on occasional netlabels such as Bit-Phalanx. The self-issued CD 003 and the digital collection Pinch Roller 2002-2006, gathering previously unheard lo-fi rave material, both emerged in 2011. Believers Roast issued the intricate digital-piano album Hiding Place in 2012. Reeves revisited his breakbeat-centric IDM aesthetic with 2013’s 013, then delivered Hiding Place #2 on Believers Roast in 2014 alongside the self-released cassette House, devoted to acid-house explorations. Archive, a vast 200-track anthology spanning unreleased recordings back to his earliest mid-’90s experiments, arrived in 2015, succeeded by It Is Always Now, a full-length project issued physically only as a USB stick. Onomatopoeia Records released Aeriform in 2016, marking just the second Gasman album to appear on vinyl after 2005’s Hardline. After three house-oriented self-releases in 2017, the Gasman returned to Onomatopoeia with the expansive Controlled Hallucination in 2018.
As a teenager drawn to breakbeat rave, the early work of Aphex Twin, and releases on the Rephlex label, Reeves started producing music on a programmable Yamaha keyboard while sampling from vinyl, cassettes, and radio broadcasts. Certain pieces originated from reel-to-reel classical tapes processed through a computer. By 1998 he had adopted Soundforge and Acid software to construct tracks, eventually shaping a signature approach that fused ornate, Baroque-tinged melodies with fragmented breakbeats enveloped in a luminous, ethereal haze. Planet Mu put out the Gasman’s first album, Remedial, in 2003; label chief Mike Paradinas selected its contents from three demo CDs. A spectral, glitch-laden ambient cut called “Imodium” surfaced on Warp Records’ limited-edition sampler Warpmart Issue 1 and on Planet Mu’s 2004 compilation Children of Mu, later appearing on the Gasman’s second Planet Mu project, the ambitious double album The Grand Electric Palace of Variety, released in 2005. That same year Reeves also appeared on Canada’s Sublight Records via Multiplex and on the U.S. label Terminal Dusk with the breakbeat-driven Hardline EP.
Early in 2006 the Gasman returned to Planet Mu with This One’s for You, whose fractured breakbeats and rave-tinged synth textures surpassed those of prior efforts in density. Later that year came Trueform, his second and final album for Sublight before the label ceased operations in 2007. Three further albums arrived in 2007: Love Collection and Audiogold on Planet Mu plus 001 on his own GasmanMusic imprint. Superlife followed on Planet Mu in 2008, while the more acid-techno-oriented Weak-base Equilibria inaugurated a series of EPs issued by netlabel the Centrifuge. Powerpoints, his seventh Planet Mu album, appeared in 2010.
Thereafter Reeves concentrated on GasmanMusic, releasing under both his established pseudonym and alternate identities including Synthia, Wiggy, and Meatman, as well as on occasional netlabels such as Bit-Phalanx. The self-issued CD 003 and the digital collection Pinch Roller 2002-2006, gathering previously unheard lo-fi rave material, both emerged in 2011. Believers Roast issued the intricate digital-piano album Hiding Place in 2012. Reeves revisited his breakbeat-centric IDM aesthetic with 2013’s 013, then delivered Hiding Place #2 on Believers Roast in 2014 alongside the self-released cassette House, devoted to acid-house explorations. Archive, a vast 200-track anthology spanning unreleased recordings back to his earliest mid-’90s experiments, arrived in 2015, succeeded by It Is Always Now, a full-length project issued physically only as a USB stick. Onomatopoeia Records released Aeriform in 2016, marking just the second Gasman album to appear on vinyl after 2005’s Hardline. After three house-oriented self-releases in 2017, the Gasman returned to Onomatopoeia with the expansive Controlled Hallucination in 2018.
Albums
