thomas köner Köner’s aesthetic principles have always adhered to the symbiotic relationships within sounds, whether they are artificially created or field recordings. His preoccupation with an aural space, his determination to not allow any one particular source to overtake or center the work, contains within it a thesis for a form of music devoid of hierarchy. The results are miasmic, but the listener never registers the impression that sources are in competition with one another, or that sources are even retained. The experiment is one of sound re-envisioned. Human voices are given less prominence than field recordings of birds chirping, and the all-pervading sound of winds is reworked into a configuration of formal mechanization, yet within the textual space Köner creates the outcome is strangely lucid and provocative. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these two discs, however, is the presiding dynamic in which sources interweave. The illusion created throughout is one of ascensions and declines. The result is an aural space that can be perceived in three dimensions. This is at once the most subtle and most thrilling characteristic of Köner. His created space does not necessitate a relation to the space we inhabit, to our reality. Rather, it can exist simultaneously, concurrently, as a parallel.