Search - Thomas Koner :: Teimo Permafrost

An experience...

Craig | Sydney Australia | 10/19/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Words will quite simply not do justice to this brilliant collection of ambient soundscapes. Thomas Koner has produced what can only be considered as THE quintessential dark ambient album. There are many fine dark ambient producers making fantastic soundscapes at the moment. Some do it just as well as Koner, but none better. This album is dark. However, not in the sense of Lustmord darkness. Listening to lustmord you get the feeling that some immense beast is lurking around the corner and will soon be doing nasty things to you. It's more hellish than Koner. Teimo/Permafrost provides a kind of immensity, a kind of enourmous solitude and thoughtful atmosphere. Some of it I think would make a good ambient soundtrack for lord of the rings in both Mordor and the Mines of Moria - odd noises barely audible, carried on the wind float past you and lead you to the inevitable question - what the hell made that noise? I really is hard to capture the feeling of this album in words. It reminds me of the slow grind of plate tectonics, of the stately orbit of neutron stars. Massive submarines moving through the depths of the ocean and fading into the darkness. Of desolate and misty plains in the middle of lands long forgotten by man. The immense beauty of nature. It really has to be experienced with a big, high quality hi-fi system to get the full effect. My system is pretty good, but I had the pleasure to hear it on a $15,000 system not long ago, and, well, wow...Please do yourself a favour and buy it.Note: Many people these days are classing any music that is not suitable for insane all night raves as ambient. Any music you can sit and listen to in your house! This album is REAL ambient. You won't hear a single beat or piece of percussion that hasn't been processed beyond recognition here. This is just a warning, as many people i've talked to have bought this album only to be dissappointed at just how ambient it is. Perhaps you should download before you buy, just to check its what you think it will be. But then BUY IT!"

Dark Ambient

Craig | 12/06/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As dark ambient musicians go, Köner is one of the best. The material here represents that genre in its purest form, with no concessions to such diluting influences as melody or rhythm. There's slowly drifting layers of dark synths, deep bass drones, all the usual stuff by the bucketload. Abyssal, sepulchral, subliminal, and so forth. Where Lustmord's older stuff had a dark, slightly demonic edge to it that suggested something nasty lurking just out of hearing, Köner's Teimo is cold, bleak, lifeless and inhospitable. Note that those aren't criticisms, that's just the way it sounds - Teimo calls up images of barren wildernesses scoured clean of life by howling winds. Not even lichen stands a chance in Köner's blasted wasteland. Well, almost - one track ("Nieve Penitentes 2") is rather more suggestive of bombers overhead than anything else. Permafrost, by contrast, takes the listener on a journey below the surface of this barren world. While it shares many of the same sonic ingredients, it's got more of an edge to it, and is a little noisier. We're not interested in lifeless wastelands and howling icy winds here, now we're floating through kilometres deep permafrost (well, I had to work the title in somehow), hearing the grinding of continental plates, listening to granite, the only sounds those of geology. Picture the lifeless landscape of Mars as seen by Pathfinder. Now imagine the same landscape - on a Bank Holiday. Sorry, I can't think of a particularly good US equivalent, since nothing ever seems to close down completely over here. Think of...umm, Nebraska, maybe? That's how utterly devoid of living things, how inhospitable Köner's soundscapes seem. All in all, good stuff, even if I can't adequately describe it. Fans of Lustmord-style dark ambient will lap it up. There's no direct comparisons to Lustmord's work - I can't say "this sounds a bit like Heresy" or anything like that. The only Lustmord that takes this bleak approach is The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, but there's not really a comparison there, Köner's work suggest a different kind of emptiness. It seems as good an introduction to dark ambient as any - Köner is, after all, one of the major names in the genre, and these two albums are almost definitively dark ambient."