Thomas Köner is a German composer, sound engineer and media artist, born in Bochum in 1965. His early trilogy, Nunatak Gongamur (1990), Teimo (1992) and Permafrost (1993), released on the Barooni label, defined a cold, slow and very low register of drone that became a reference for the isolationist music of the 1990s.
Much of that sound comes from gongs, brushed and rubbed under extremely close microphones, then slowed and processed until they resemble wind across ice or the creak of a distant structure; the sleeves used archival images of polar expeditions. In 2010 the three albums were reissued together by Type. In parallel he formed the dub techno duo Porter Ricks, whose Biokinetics appeared on Chain Reaction in 1996, and released solo work on Mille Plateaux. His audiovisual pieces earned a Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, and since 1994 he has performed live scores for around thirty silent films, among them Nosferatu and Metropolis.