New edition of Thomas Köner's fourth album, recorded in 1994-1995.
Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. His music is often defined as dark ambient or drone, because of the use of low frequencies, material from gongs,shadowy resonances and boreal ambience, but at the same time its sound with constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, what makes it organic, human and almost comforting.
Köners soundscapes are no longer simply dark, the question now is that of a profound blackness. Such is the generic darkness of the abyss, the void and vacuum, the darkness of more than silence, of catastrophe and cataclysm, but also the soundscapes have utopian moments. It is a cosmological blackness, the black of nonbeing.
The more subtractive, the blacker the sound synthesis, Köner writes. Such blackness is non-music. Music will never be music until it ceases to represent and begins to sound like non-music or monochrome.
"Whoever hears the distortion of all sounds, will soon become Ultrablack. Whoever listens to this world, but has no affection for any of its sites, even to the place of Black Noise, may soon reach Ultrablack. Whoever understands the spirit of impartiality through ten thousand million partial tones, hears Ultrablack and can no longer be measured. No measures, no enclosures, no properties are the sign of ultrablack scores." Thomas Köner
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.
