Drøne * Thomas Köner * Claudio F. Baroni
Three different sonic adventures full of ‘ambience’ but not really ‘ambient’: Drøne, Thomas Köner and Claudio F. Baroni.
Three different sonic adventures full of ‘ambience’ but not really ‘ambient’: Drøne, Thomas Köner and Claudio F. Baroni.
The sound of plankton as recorded by Jana Winderen – Thomas Köner’s tribute to the Light – inward/outward journeys by Dronny Darko and Alphaxone.
The sound of current state of affairs is not particularly reassuring: Thomas Köner presents an Opéra Digitale based on the Futurist Manifesto, Machinefabriek and Anne Bakker keep you alert with alarming string glissandi, and Multicast Dynamics adds some glacial Scandinavian cold.
Thomas Köner is perhaps the Jules Verne of ambient-electronic soundscapes: his sounds seem to come from the deepest ocean, the centre of the earth, the vastest spaces imaginable. If you know his work, you will often immediately recognise his sound when you hear it – and maybe feel it before you even hear it.
Knowing his back-catalogue, the choice of a piano as the main instrument for his new album is somewhat surprising. Piano notes are clearly fixed in time, as opposed to the stretched sounds Thomas Köner usually applies. It is, in a way, a bit of a “rigid instrument”.