Bleep

Press Release

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.