A new edition of Thomas Köner's album inspired by the capital of Greenland and the wide open spaces of the Arctic region, an ideal gateway into the world of the German musician and sound artist.
Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. Alongside Wolfgang Voigt's "Gas" project, Köner has been centrally responsible for electronic music's fascination with depth and reduction. His signature sound is vast, seemingly endless, which at first seems homogenous and infinite, but once exposed to it, when our senses calibrate to the fine nuances of changes, we discover and immerse into abundance of textures, richness of modulations and almost infinite range of sonic titilations.
Köner's work was inspired by his frequent travels in the Arctic, and listeners feel his music as a journey to mysterious worlds of the Arctic region. The experience of being exposed to the extreme cold, the hightening of our senses and ability to notice even the slightest changes in color, sound, light or density that creates this dangerously reductive environment, is like an immersion in the sonic world of this German artist, where masterfully crafted layers of sound open into colossal spaces, teeming with aural life, waiting to be discovered by those who venture into it. The titles of Köner's highly regarded albums from the 90's ever so often play with this affinity—Nunatak, Permafrost, Teimo—all reference to the world of the Artic region, just as his album Nuuk that points us to the capital of Greenland. Subdued and minimal at first glance, this album is brimming with low-end frequences, shadowy resonances and boreal ambience, but at the same time, constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, makes it very organic, human and almost comforting, like the tiny harbour existing in the sea of ice, it is named after.
Originally published as one of four CD's on the 1997 compilation Driftworks, which also included albums by Nijiumu,
Pauline Oliveros & Randi Raine-Reusch and Paul Schütze, the album was re-relased in 2004 by MillePlateauxMedia. It also served as the source of music material and inspiration for Thomas Köner's video art by the same.
Thomas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) studied at Musikhochschule Dortmund and CEM Studio Arnhem. He is a distinctive figure in the fields of
contemporary music, techno and multimedia art, working across the spheres of composition, visual arts, installation work and music production. For more than three decades his work has been internationally recognised, receiving awards such as Golden Nica Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale Award (Berlin), Best Young Artist at ARCO (Madrid), and many more.
His familiarity with both the visual and
sonic art resulted in numerous commissions to create music for silent films for the Auditorium du Musée du Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and others. Likewise, he created installations for diverse situations for example ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Santiago de Chile, to name a few.
His works are part of the collections of significant museums such as Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris, Musée d'art contemporain, Montréal. Thomas Köner is continuing his close relationship with sound art by creating
radiophonic works for the national Radio in Germany and France (Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR Studio Akustische Kunst, Radio France), while also working as a live performer and composer and producer. His music compositions from the early 90's, including albums
Permafrost,
Nunatak and
Teimo (Type label), were considered pioneering in the field of minimal electronic. His next album
Novaya Zemlya was released by
Touch. Köner's acclaimed production skills with his more beat-oriented duo Porter Ricks, whose album
Biokinetics is considered “a classic of techno sound”, resulted in remix commissions for a.o. Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails.
His performances and installations are audiovisual meditations that explore our notion of
time, memory and location. He invites audiences to enjoy impressions of depth, distance and disappearance, and to fathom the qualities of the space around our limits of perception.
