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All Music Guide:
One 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.
Wikipedia:
Thomas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) is a multimedia artist whose main interest lies in combining visual and auditory experiences. He's been noted for his use of low frequencies. The BBC, in a review of Köner's work in 1997, calls him a "media artist," one who works between installation, sound art, ambient music and as one half of Porter Ricks dub techno.
During his exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, the museum called him a major innovator in the contemporary music scene, as well as noted his collaborative practice which has led to his working with musicians, filmmakers and visual artists on installations and sound performances, and to his creation of six video works produced in two cycles, starting in 2003.
2006 Köner produced Station Eismitte, a work inspired by Alfred Wegener's 1930 arctic expedition and named after the expedition's site.
2009 Köner created The Futurist Manifesto, a digital opera, to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the famous manifesto published in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. This work has been performed live several times in festivals across Europe with Carl Faia and Iris Garrelfs.
