Thomas Koner — Novaya Zemlya

Thomas Koner is one of the oldest and most distinctive voices in ambient music.  His debut "Nunatak Gongamur" came out around the same time as Lustmord's "Heresy", and along with that album marked the beginning of an era of explorations into the colder and less sympathetic possibilities of the soundscape genre.  Koner's work lacks the forced satanic cheesiness Lustmord often embraced, instead serving as a description of those untouched parts of nature furthest from human society, particularly the arctic.  "Novaya Zemlya" is the latest in Koner's ever thematic string of albums, one of the sparsest and quietest of the bunch.

At first, I felt underwhelmed, thinking the music 'hollow' and too stereotypical of Koner, only a vague sketch of a soundspace, too far below the threshold of hearing.  Without a silent listening environment and a proper soundsystem, the distant thunderclaps and echoes of tiny avalanches (the loudest sounds on the recording and still rounded, muffling and deep like banks of snow), are hardly audible amidst what sounds like dead silence.  It is useful to recall that Koner is only imitating the quietude of real places, unforgiving and largely inanimate frozen lands.

As always with Koner, there is some very deep bass, and the production in general is incredibly dynamic and high in fidelity, using the entire frequency spectrum.  This perfectionist ear is one of the ways Koner has retained his distinctiveness over the years.  Another is his decision to omit synthesizers and excessive artificial reverberation.  Field recordings are Koner's primary tool: nature's patient, gestural rhythms are the most multi-faceted abstract language of all. 

The longer one spends listening to this immaculately detailed piece of work, the more one is drawn into the quietest sounds, the tiny nuances.  At the same time, one is never quite sure if some of the background sounds come from their own home environment or Koner's music: the sounds are so cleanly recorded that they could be coming from one's own living room.

The album is divided into 3 parts, each 11-13 minutes long.  Each has slightly different distributions of frequencies and spacial panning, but maintain the same hushed emptiness.  The latter 2 parts contain some bassy quasi-tonal drifts and contact sounds, which could be pitched down samples of percussion, something which is new to Koner.  A flicker of human emotion nearly gleams through, yet leaves the hibernative arctic landscape for the most part undisturbed.

Conclusively, "Novaya Zemlya" is a worthy Thomas Koner album, a masterful construction that makes most ambient music sound sappy, one dimensional and overdone.  If at first it doesn't make an impression on you, listen again when in a quiet place and a patient state of mind, and it will open up to you.  Listening to Koner's sounds here nearly recreates the truly spiritual experience of standing on a snowy mountaintop.