Thomas Köner

by John BushOne of the few musicians with ties to the unrelated but somewhat connected fields of contemporary avant-garde, techno and indie-rock, Thomas Köner has released albums of sparse ambience for the Barooni label, recorded similarly skeletal and lo-fi techno (with Andy Mellwig) as Porter Ricks, and appeared on albums by Bill Laswell's Divination as well as Sonic Boom's EAR collective. A native of the Netherlands, Köner began recording with 1991's Nunatak Gongamur, the first in a series of LPs for the Dutch Barooni label. The next two, Teimo and Permafrost, were later collected onto one disc by Mille Plateaux, and followed by Aubrite in 1996. That same year, Köner appeared on Distill, an album by the Bill Laswell-based ambient-dub project Divination -- which called a roll of experimentalist composers, including Paul Schütze, Pete Namlook, Anton Fier, Haroumi Hosono, Mick Harris and Tetsu Inoue. Also lending his name -- literally -- to an EAR (Experimental Audio Research) album titled The Köner Experiment, he produced the work with rhythm and programming help from Andy Mellwig. Mellwig and Köner had already recorded several EPs of shadowed techno as Porter Ricks (later collected on the Chain Reaction quasi-compilation Biokinetics). The Köner solo effort Kaamos followed in 1998.