Overall, what prevails is the strange affectivity Köner’s seemingly colourless tracts induce—their depth of field as against the disengaged ambiguity of Enovian Ambient’s play of surface.
“Listening to his music, we escape the habitual notion of time and space, facing a sense of eternity or infinity that is both stunning and frightening.” (Thierry Charollais, Novaya Zemlya liner notes)
Thomas Köner has an uncanny way with sonic representation of the bleak otherness of extreme domains. His special powers first came to light (however wan) in early 90s emissions, seminal documents from the isolationist edge, once recondite, recently brought to a wider public via Type’s recent Nunatak•Teimo•Permafrost re-packaging. His unheimlich maneuvers are heard to all their cold prickly effect on his latest, Novaya Zemlya. The Northern Siberian archipelago’s name translates as “new land,” a nomenclature at best infelicitous; as one of the earth’s most extreme places what it betokens is as far from a new world symphony as can be imagined. Depopulated by Soviet Cold War-lords for some of history’s most destructive nuclear tests, this eastern-most place in Europe, a modernist Ultima Thule, is tailor-made for Köner, who just can’t get enough of that frosty stuff. “Towards a metaphysical geography,” goes the liner note essay’s sub-title, effectively serving to cast the listener adrift in a suggestively blighted landscape. Concept: the human condition mirrored in our psycho-physical) environment—the extreme heard-seen within the extreme. What’s that sound…?
From the start of “Novaya Zemlya 1” comes a peculiar plosive, an ultra-low frequency of ominous portent detonation of the deleterious Tsar Bomba, from whose audio-modeled aftermath toxic trickles seep throughout. Sparse, isolated, odd chthonic rumbles well up, as if sub-noises off, beyond the event horizon. Offsetting the low is a shimmering remotion, faint and mirage-like, soon effaced by icecap-creak and floe-split. Then it’s a wind-scoured and glitch-pocked tundra of further muffled detonations and atmospheric stasis. The array of chthonic creak and sub-pulse, lowercase scrawl and glacial electronics is, ultimately, as engrossing as it is, initially, forbidding. Remotion and absence abound, as greyed-out drones, eerie silences, tectonic tremor, industrial hum and radio crackle evoke a ravaged terrain, bespeaking hazard and blight. Yet a chronostatic calm predominates, articulated through emplacement of an endlessness of sonic events at the ascoltatory threshold – more like space, or air-fabric, a palpable yet ungraspable sounding object, much sub- and -liminal. Tones distend and turn in on themselves – into evacuated resonance. “Novaya Zemlya 2″ is haunted by disembodied voices deep within, like eldritch transmissions from lost souls, compounding the foreboding, as do the sinister knocks emerging like the hubble-bubble of breathing apparatus. “Novaya Zemlya 3″ further substantiates the low-end theory till echoing notes swirl and upwell, gusts and rumblings becoming infused with a peculiar bloom of strangely luminous ghost-melody, like a fata morgana viewed against the prevalent pall.
Overall, what prevails is the strange affectivity Köner’s seemingly colourless tracts induce—their depth of field as against the disengaged ambiguity of Enovian Ambient’s play of surface. The icefloe-bound sound around this white-noise-wind-wracked far-flung no-man’s-land may evoke an end of days narrative, but enfolds more within it. For all its toxic radio-phonic leakage, all its sullen remotion, its bleakness as unsettling as any dark ambient gloom-fest, the inchoate liminal melody wisps sonorously condensed in those tenuous slivers stand in expressive relief against a morass of mute hummings and field flotsam, signifying humankind, nature-love and spirit, still smouldering amid a ruinous pall that has all but extinguished everything else.
Novaya Zemlya is available on Touch. [Release page]
