Thomas Köner's eighth album, originally released in 2002, including a 12 minute bonus track.
"The Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers—from social networks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet strives to express. We need to cool down. Thomas Köner's music can help change the pace of our perceptions:
1) In DAIKAN (2002)—a Japanese term meaning "the coldest" or "the coldest part of the year"—the ear stretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a sonic drama offers the slowness thanks to which the skin of perceptions can reconstitute themselves; icequakes awaken listeners to the frozen life without scaring them.
2) Banlieue du Vide, considered by many to be Thomas Köner's most iconic audiovisual work and best kept secret, has not been released previously. It is in the collection of a couple of art museums, e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has been awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004, in the category Digital Musics.
Banlieue du Vide is the result of months of time-lapse observations of empty streets in the Finnish Arctic Circle, shown in glacially slow slow-motion. Phase cancellation, on which all noise cancelling technology is based, here affects the perception of time, the sense of the flow of time extinguishing itself. At this stage the void is not yet empty, traces of past noise fill the listeners mind with their haunting presence.
A remastered stereo version of the soundtrack is released as a special premiere as Bonus Track of the DAIKAN album.
Listening to this album, an excess of heat turns into an empowering coldness—like the transient feeling of our terrestrial embodiment in the midst of entropy."
Frédéric Neyrat
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.
