Köner’s particular brand of formalism unmoors the work from its author, becomes pure, organic creative process and aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.
Composing electronic music, as compared to composing for acoustic instruments, is a distinction only gradual in nature, writes Thomas Köner. At the core of all his work are a sense of place and a sense of color. Sound, he explains, is a “spectral power that enables resonance,” and resonance is pristine, detached from origin, its own topos. Sound is another country on no map.
Celebrated since his recording debut with stiller than still life glacial ambient (Nunatuk Gongamur, Teimo, Permafrost, 1990-93), Tiento de la Luz is the middle section of a trilogy opened with Tiento de las Nieves and planned to close with Tiento de la Oscuridad. In it, Köner expands the original duo of piano and electronics to include a second piano, percussion and viola da gamba.
Though rigorously discreet, this tiento is muscular in Rembrandtian light, heaving huge and curvy as a man o´ war, never berthing because it is too big, big as continents. It is its own siren call, toward which it forever smoothly plies. Köner’s particular brand of formalism unmoors the work from its author, becomes pure, organic creative process and aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.
Tiento de la Luz is available on Denovali.
