Observing Thomas Köner’s oeuvre one is struck by the effortlessness, indeed poetry of his works. Although he has his roots in music, as early as 2001, as a result of its visual strengths and conceptual approach, his record Unerforschtes Gebiet (uncharted territory) went well beyond the purely musical. Audio and visual experiences act as stimuli for Köner to produce new works; by means of composing he aims to discover something about his past or his relationship with the world.

Fifteen years after his initial enthusiasm for a travel report about a failed expedition to the North Pole¹, in the accompanying map of the Arctic, which was approximately one hundred years old, Köner discerned a musical score, which he then took for his record Unerforschtes Gebiet. The picture disc displays the terra incognita, symbolically portrayed in white, which lends it its name, a vast uncharted expanse around the North Pole. In different ways the two compositions, each lasting around 20 minutes, combine and modulate the same material. It is significant that the work was realized as a record, as the primary source of its sound is the recording of a record needle scratching across the vinyl of an empty picture disc.

The artist compares the needle moving to the center of the record with that of a sleigh heading across the ice towards the North Pole. The main conceptual sound, a hissing with minimum tone, blends with other sounds that cannot be identified more closely: A light sound structure then follows a denser, low-frequency sound pattern; a grainy hissing yields to a sound similar to that of steadily falling rain. Dark grainy interludes overlap wind-like noises, while behind others one could surmise the gentle, steady rattle of a train. Smooth, light, and dark passages, reminiscent of drones, rise up before ebbing away again, overlaid at times with crackling. All this is permeated with softly imploding sounds, a distant rumbling that leaves a sense of vastness: Sounds that fade in and out remind one of objects approaching before moving away again and create the impression of acoustic imprecision that is difficult to fathom. Do these minimal shifts actually take place, or do we just imagine them?

In addition to the works of James Turrell, Köner cites as a reference for his artistic activity Claude Monet’s series depicting Rouen Cathedral: “You can see so clearly in the pictures of the cathedral how the object portrayed, the light coming up, and the colors act totally independently of each other, indeed float. In itself, I find the object portrayed boring, but I like it when it floats.”³ The object retreats from the impression we have of it; in this way it remains unaffected by the way it is portrayed. In the same way the uncharted territory retains its secret: Is that the sound of ice cracking, or is it that of a storm brewing somewhere? Can we hear wind blowing across the ice, or rather the echoes of an industrial area?⁴

For Köner, the real source of the sounds is not definitive; he uses then on account of their concrete qualities. An, as it were, painterly treatment of sound is characteristic of his compositions. His range consists primarily of fractured tones that have emerged from a treatment of the original sounds that includes lengthening, amplification, echoing etc. Köner gives the sounds a tactile quality, like that of snow crunching under the soles of shoes. By means of combining these transformed tones he achieves an extremely complex, monochrome overall effect. The music is as varied as the idea behind the piece in question permits. In this context Köner creates a fascinating abundance with a minimum of source material.⁵ Listeners only cotton on to this by opening themselves up to the sound. By concentrating on sound per se, through the lack of melody and rhythm, Köner achieves a high degree of presence now. He undermines expectations of the future continuation of rhythms and he banishes the mental repetition of past melodies from our memory. The openness in the sound’s progression and the lack of predictable occurrences enable listeners to liberate themselves from any expectations and to listen from one moment to the next.

By probing these subtle changes the time spent listening seems to slow down. Real times becomes perceived time. This is what Köner had to say about this aspect: “Experiencing time is of the essence for me ?…?. If a piece of music of mine technically lasts 10 minutes but to the listener seems to last half an hour ?…?, what about the extra 20 minutes? I view it as a miracle, a gift within our concept text of a world, in which we are constantly losing time.”⁶

Paradoxically his music causes listeners to gain time and at one and the same time lose themselves in it. Unerforschtes Gebiet also benefits from Köner’s close attention to natural time-related phenomena, with extremely slow rhythms such as the transition from day to night or inhaling and exhaling, which is present in everything. The composer does not achieve calm primarily through reducing the volume but by creating a peaceful, easy atmosphere.

Extreme cold makes our senses extremely vigilant, any sound, such as for example ice cracking is perceived extremely clearly. Köner transports the experience of heightened perception he made himself in temperatures as low as –35 °C to his compositions and evokes them in his music by combining low volume with minimum modulation. He uses this heightening and slowing down of perception to prolong the passage of time to achieve something which, “is like a door, through which one enters new spaces.” These can be intermediate areas between the inaudible audible and audible inaudible, as well as associative approaches to undetermined terrain. Though Köner prefers not to illustrate facts and as such for Unerforschtes Gebiet he deliberately resorts to using an out-of-date map. Even the titles of his works are an indication that on a more abstract level he is interested in peripheral areas and emptiness. “Emptiness has so many forms you cannot describe it“. The 2001 record is one of Köner’s numerous approaches to calmness and expanse. Listeners can fathom non-comprehensible and enjoy the ephemeral, which repeatedly escapes them as they listen to the record.

The calmness it offers is in subtle opposition to loud, fast effects. Köner’s work is free of implied meaning, it does not adhere to a “concept of proclaiming something“. Rather, the artist is concerned with “searching for beauty in situations that are not normally regarded as beautiful. ?…? I do not agree with those who say that there is nothing new under the sun. Of course any territory can be charted, but it seems the further I go the vaster it gets, and I am still busy with the small things. In fact every moment is rich with detail.”⁷

Köner penetrates the depth of the sounds and gets as far as possible away from any center. In his efforts to get round it, however, on the periphery he always discovers new temporary focal points, which, as soon as he reaches, he leaves again. Like his advances, the record needle nears the hollow middle, the empty zero point, around which everything revolves. The artist is in search of what comes then, of what lies in store, of what happens if one probes ever deeper: “That is the puzzle: would you fall off the disc, if you go as far the horizon – if you could get to the very end?“

For Unerforschtes Gebiet, Köner deliberately chose a picture disc as the medium; its vinyl is softer and every time it is played wears away more than traditional record material, such that the quality of the reproduction deteriorates continually. Since the main source of the sounds used is the recording of the non-embossed picture disc, every time the composition is played it gets closer to its goal, the record’s original material. The sounds of emptiness are already contained in the music, which morphs itself back into the scratching of the needle over the pure ice. Ultimately in acoustic terms one has come full circle. “The music approaches the music.”

1 Fridtjof Nansen, In Nacht und Eis. Die Norwegische Polarexpedition 1893-1896, (Leipzig, 1897).

2 Drone is the original English term for an accompanying tone, usually always on the same scale that persists during the entire melody or a significant portion of the music. In certain niches of experimental (Pop) music, it frees itself from this accompanying role and becomes the main, constitutive feature.

3 Unless otherwise stated the quotations come from a phone interview with the artist in July 2007.

4 The noises of the industrial area in which Köner grew up made a lasting impression on him.

5 In comparison with other minimalist musicians Köner’s music is relatively opulent. By way of example, short reference should be made here to Richard Chartier and Ryoji Ikeda. Chartier researches the relationship between the expansion of sound in space and calmness, his work involves the use of very low frequencies on the border of what is audible. Ikeda on the other hand addresses the essential physical qualities of sound, in artistic terms he operates with white hissing and sinus tones.

6 Thomas Köner, „Le silence au fond de l’abîme“, in: KunstMusik. Schriften zur Musik als Kunst, eds. Maria de Alvear & Raoul Mörchen, no. 5 (Fall 2005), pp. 23-25, p. 24.

7 e.g., Nuuk (capital city of Greenland), Permafrost, Station Eismitte, Kaamos (Finnish for the three months in winter when it never gets light), Banlieu du Vide (French for suburb of emptiness), Zerfallgebiete, Niemandsbucht, Périphériques

8 Thomas Köner 2005 (as footnote 5), p. 23 and p. 25.

Observing Thomas Köner’s oeuvre one is struck by the effortlessness, indeed poetry of his works. Although he has his roots in music, as early as 2001, as a result of its visual strengths and conceptual approach, his record Unerforschtes Gebiet (uncharted territory) went well beyond the purely musical. Audio and visual experiences act as stimuli for Köner to produce new works; by means of composing he aims to discover something about his past or his relationship with the world.

Fifteen years after his initial enthusiasm for a travel report about a failed expedition to the North Pole¹, in the accompanying map of the Arctic, which was approximately one hundred years old, Köner discerned a musical score, which he then took for his record Unerforschtes Gebiet. The picture disc displays the terra incognita, symbolically portrayed in white, which lends it its name, a vast uncharted expanse around the North Pole. In different ways the two compositions, each lasting around 20 minutes, combine and modulate the same material. It is significant that the work was realized as a record, as the primary source of its sound is the recording of a record needle scratching across the vinyl of an empty picture disc.

The artist compares the needle moving to the center of the record with that of a sleigh heading across the ice towards the North Pole. The main conceptual sound, a hissing with minimum tone, blends with other sounds that cannot be identified more closely: A light sound structure then follows a denser, low-frequency sound pattern; a grainy hissing yields to a sound similar to that of steadily falling rain. Dark grainy interludes overlap wind-like noises, while behind others one could surmise the gentle, steady rattle of a train. Smooth, light, and dark passages, reminiscent of drones, rise up before ebbing away again, overlaid at times with crackling. All this is permeated with softly imploding sounds, a distant rumbling that leaves a sense of vastness: Sounds that fade in and out remind one of objects approaching before moving away again and create the impression of acoustic imprecision that is difficult to fathom. Do these minimal shifts actually take place, or do we just imagine them?

In addition to the works of James Turrell, Köner cites as a reference for his artistic activity Claude Monet’s series depicting Rouen Cathedral: “You can see so clearly in the pictures of the cathedral how the object portrayed, the light coming up, and the colors act totally independently of each other, indeed float. In itself, I find the object portrayed boring, but I like it when it floats.”³ The object retreats from the impression we have of it; in this way it remains unaffected by the way it is portrayed. In the same way the uncharted territory retains its secret: Is that the sound of ice cracking, or is it that of a storm brewing somewhere? Can we hear wind blowing across the ice, or rather the echoes of an industrial area?⁴

For Köner, the real source of the sounds is not definitive; he uses then on account of their concrete qualities. An, as it were, painterly treatment of sound is characteristic of his compositions. His range consists primarily of fractured tones that have emerged from a treatment of the original sounds that includes lengthening, amplification, echoing etc. Köner gives the sounds a tactile quality, like that of snow crunching under the soles of shoes. By means of combining these transformed tones he achieves an extremely complex, monochrome overall effect. The music is as varied as the idea behind the piece in question permits. In this context Köner creates a fascinating abundance with a minimum of source material.⁵ Listeners only cotton on to this by opening themselves up to the sound. By concentrating on sound per se, through the lack of melody and rhythm, Köner achieves a high degree of presence now. He undermines expectations of the future continuation of rhythms and he banishes the mental repetition of past melodies from our memory. The openness in the sound’s progression and the lack of predictable occurrences enable listeners to liberate themselves from any expectations and to listen from one moment to the next.

By probing these subtle changes the time spent listening seems to slow down. Real times becomes perceived time. This is what Köner had to say about this aspect: “Experiencing time is of the essence for me ?…?. If a piece of music of mine technically lasts 10 minutes but to the listener seems to last half an hour ?…?, what about the extra 20 minutes? I view it as a miracle, a gift within our concept text of a world, in which we are constantly losing time.”⁶

Paradoxically his music causes listeners to gain time and at one and the same time lose themselves in it. Unerforschtes Gebiet also benefits from Köner’s close attention to natural time-related phenomena, with extremely slow rhythms such as the transition from day to night or inhaling and exhaling, which is present in everything. The composer does not achieve calm primarily through reducing the volume but by creating a peaceful, easy atmosphere.

Extreme cold makes our senses extremely vigilant, any sound, such as for example ice cracking is perceived extremely clearly. Köner transports the experience of heightened perception he made himself in temperatures as low as –35 °C to his compositions and evokes them in his music by combining low volume with minimum modulation. He uses this heightening and slowing down of perception to prolong the passage of time to achieve something which, “is like a door, through which one enters new spaces.” These can be intermediate areas between the inaudible audible and audible inaudible, as well as associative approaches to undetermined terrain. Though Köner prefers not to illustrate facts and as such for Unerforschtes Gebiet he deliberately resorts to using an out-of-date map. Even the titles of his works are an indication that on a more abstract level he is interested in peripheral areas and emptiness. “Emptiness has so many forms you cannot describe it“. The 2001 record is one of Köner’s numerous approaches to calmness and expanse. Listeners can fathom non-comprehensible and enjoy the ephemeral, which repeatedly escapes them as they listen to the record.

The calmness it offers is in subtle opposition to loud, fast effects. Köner’s work is free of implied meaning, it does not adhere to a “concept of proclaiming something“. Rather, the artist is concerned with “searching for beauty in situations that are not normally regarded as beautiful. ?…? I do not agree with those who say that there is nothing new under the sun. Of course any territory can be charted, but it seems the further I go the vaster it gets, and I am still busy with the small things. In fact every moment is rich with detail.”⁷

Köner penetrates the depth of the sounds and gets as far as possible away from any center. In his efforts to get round it, however, on the periphery he always discovers new temporary focal points, which, as soon as he reaches, he leaves again. Like his advances, the record needle nears the hollow middle, the empty zero point, around which everything revolves. The artist is in search of what comes then, of what lies in store, of what happens if one probes ever deeper: “That is the puzzle: would you fall off the disc, if you go as far the horizon – if you could get to the very end?“

For Unerforschtes Gebiet, Köner deliberately chose a picture disc as the medium; its vinyl is softer and every time it is played wears away more than traditional record material, such that the quality of the reproduction deteriorates continually. Since the main source of the sounds used is the recording of the non-embossed picture disc, every time the composition is played it gets closer to its goal, the record’s original material. The sounds of emptiness are already contained in the music, which morphs itself back into the scratching of the needle over the pure ice. Ultimately in acoustic terms one has come full circle. “The music approaches the music.”

1 Fridtjof Nansen, In Nacht und Eis. Die Norwegische Polarexpedition 1893-1896, (Leipzig, 1897).

2 Drone is the original English term for an accompanying tone, usually always on the same scale that persists during the entire melody or a significant portion of the music. In certain niches of experimental (Pop) music, it frees itself from this accompanying role and becomes the main, constitutive feature.

3 Unless otherwise stated the quotations come from a phone interview with the artist in July 2007.

4 The noises of the industrial area in which Köner grew up made a lasting impression on him.

5 In comparison with other minimalist musicians Köner’s music is relatively opulent. By way of example, short reference should be made here to Richard Chartier and Ryoji Ikeda. Chartier researches the relationship between the expansion of sound in space and calmness, his work involves the use of very low frequencies on the border of what is audible. Ikeda on the other hand addresses the essential physical qualities of sound, in artistic terms he operates with white hissing and sinus tones.

6 Thomas Köner, „Le silence au fond de l’abîme“, in: KunstMusik. Schriften zur Musik als Kunst, eds. Maria de Alvear & Raoul Mörchen, no. 5 (Fall 2005), pp. 23-25, p. 24.

7 e.g., Nuuk (capital city of Greenland), Permafrost, Station Eismitte, Kaamos (Finnish for the three months in winter when it never gets light), Banlieu du Vide (French for suburb of emptiness), Zerfallgebiete, Niemandsbucht, Périphériques

8 Thomas Köner 2005 (as footnote 5), p. 23 and p. 25.