{"title":"Thomas Koner","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"nuuk","title":"Nuuk","description":"\u003cp\u003eThomas 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 titillations.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKöner’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 heightening 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe titles of Köner’s highly regarded albums from the 90’s ever so often play with this affinity – \u003ci\u003eNunatak, Permafrost, Teimo\u003c\/i\u003e - all reference to the world of the Arctic region, just as his album \u003ci\u003eNuuk\u003c\/i\u003e that points us to the capital of Greenland. Subdued and minimal at first glance, this album is brimming with low-end frequencies, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginally published as one of four CD’s on the 1997 compilation\u003ci\u003e Driftworks\u003c\/i\u003e, which also included albums by Nijiumu, Pauline Oliveros and Randi Raine-Reusch and Paul Schütze, the album was re-released in 2004 by MillePlateauxMedia. It also served as the source of music material and inspiration for Thomas Köner’s video art by the same title, which was awarded a Tiger Cub Award at the 34th International Film Festival in Rotterdam a year later.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mille Plateaux","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50454557458763,"sku":"1115762","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/74536903-9558-49b0-911c-19a9cee12b3f_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727184662"},{"product_id":"aubrite","title":"Aubrite","description":"\u003cp\u003eThomas 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKöners 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"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.\" Thomas Köner \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAubrite\u003c\/i\u003e was first released 1995 on the label Barooni. Roland Speckle helped with production of the album. \u003ci\u003eAubrite\u003c\/i\u003e is the name of a group of meteorites named for Aubres, a small achondrite meteorite that fell near Nyons in 1836.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mille Plateaux","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50454605889867,"sku":"1126094","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50454606676299,"sku":"1126095","price":37.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/f524e4a5-a927-4a21-b8c0-dfa1b9265328_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727184930"},{"product_id":"daikan","title":"Daikan","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers—from social\nnetworks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet\nstrives to express.\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe need to cool down. Thomas Köner’s music can help change the pace of our perceptions:\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1) In DAIKAN (2002) — a Japanese term meaning “the coldest” or “the coldest part of the year”—the ear\nstretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a sonic drama offers the slowness thanks to\nwhich the skin of perceptions can reconstitute themselves; icequakes awaken listeners to the frozen life\nwithout scaring them.\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e2) Banlieue du Vide, considered by many to be Thomas Köner’s most iconic audiovisual work and best kept\nsecret, has not been released previously. It is in the collection of a couple of art museums, e.g. the Centre\nPompidou in Paris, and has been awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004, in the category\nDigital Musics. Banlieue du Vide is the result of months of time-lapse observations of empty streets in the\nFinnish Arctic Circle, shown in glacially slow slow-motion. Phase cancellation, on which all noise cancelling\ntechnology is based, here affects the perception of time, the sense of the flow of time extinguishing itself.\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt this stage the void is not yet empty, traces of past noise fill the listeners mind with their haunting\npresence. A remastered stereo version of the soundtrack is released as a special premiere as Bonus Track\nof the DAIKAN album. Listening to this album, an excess of heat turns into an empowering coldness—like\nthe transient feeling of our terrestrial embodiment in the midst of entropy.\n\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFréderic Neyrat in October 2022\n\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mille Plateaux","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50468324213067,"sku":"2007166","price":36.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50468322181451,"sku":"2007164","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/MP49CD_ba5c0499_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727346944"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/thomas-koner.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}