thomas koner

Nunatak (Special Vinyl Edition)

*INITIAL COPIES COME ON TRANSPARENT VINYL* NUNATAK WAS THE FIRST EVER ALBUM FROM THOMAS KONER, ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 1990 AND NEVER PREVIOUSLY AVAILABLE ON VINYL, NOW BEAUTIFULLY REMASTERED BY THE ARTIST AND CUT AT DUBPLATES AND MASTERING FOR THIS STRICTLY LIMITED EDITION PRESSING* Thomas Köner is practically a byword for the most sublime and haunting variant of sonic darkness imaginable. Type know this all too well and now find themselves giving life to his debut album 'Nunatuk' from almost 20 years ago, the first in a tryptich of beyond-essential LPs pressed on vinyl with brand new artwork. The acclaimed multi-media artist works in a number of disciplines, from his best known audio productions, including soundtracks for silent films and seminal techno records as Porter Ricks, to photography and video installations and even performance art. A full package, you might say. At the heart of this body of work is an undeniably Northern European sense of innate, isolationist psychedelia, an unfathomably lonely soul which has attracted a devoted following among listeners from the avant-garde, techno, and electronica communities. When we think of what came before Köner, we could reference the musique conrete of Pierre Henry, the alien electro-acoustics of Bernard Parmegiani or the gothic ambience of Lustmord, but Koner was of, and ahead of, his time, deploying up-to-date technology to enable his sheer execution of sound, literally making his widescreen atmospheres shiver and chill with an exquisite balance of elemental power and filigree delicacy that's been barely achieved before or since. He sourced the vastly spacious palette of sounds for this album through careful and measured use of gongs, crucially recorded in different shaped room reverbs and underwater, as well as homemade wind instruments and a mysterious application of processing, enabling him to achieve the sort of frequency modulations and subatomic vibrations that make his music so incredibly tactile and deeply affecting. These conceptual methods allow his music to evoke images of endless arctic tundras, chasmic cave spaces high in the mountains and barren, unwelcoming psyche environs just begging to be explored by the intrepid listener. Now nearly 20 years old, it's fair to say that nearly all dark ambient and drone artists, from Biosphere to Deathprod or Sunn 0))), have been operating in the shadow of this material and it's low frequency doomscapes. For anyone with a taste for the darkside, this is essentially one of the finest single malt varieties money can buy. Do not miss.