White Vinyl
Who knew - landmark electronic music from the middle of England and, for what it's worth, this writer's hometown. Coventry is a strangely unremarkable place, a largely populated city famed for little more than its post-war, post-industrial status. It's cultural exports can be notable but aside from The Specials, are mostly understated - poet-emigre Philip Larkin preferred to claim Hull as his home; even in the overly-excavated narratives of post-punk most of Coventry's contributions remain obscured; and it's only recently that the city has taken to acknowledging the pioneering work of Delia Derbyshire. Civic pride seems low on the ground. The Köner Experiment, part recorded at Cabin Studios in CV1 by E.A.R. mastermind Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) and made with an array of highly esteemed contributors, is another typically underappreciated product of the city's musical heritage. That may also be in part attributable to the involvement of its title's namesake, Thomas Köner, who along with his Porter Ricks sidekick Andy Mellwig, lend these 12 numerically titled tracks a distinctly late 90s German bent, expanding into characteristic sub-aquatic dub techno and fractured ambience - it's not for nothing this was originally released on Mille Plateaux. Unexpectedly, this sound does find a fitting parallel in the topography of Coventry, a Blitz-demolished city characterised, at least in 1997, by quick-build brutalist architecture and a infamously restrictive Ballardian ring-road system that entrenches the place in depressive grey fug. The Köner Experiment feels as if it's dredged from this mire, its psychogeography cast in decaying drones, clicks and pulses, the submerged nighttime sounds of a non-metropolis. That Kevin Shields and AMM's Eddie Prevost also feature and we're still having to remind the world of its existence speaks volumes of the low-pitched tone of a cult classic. Coventry clearly doesn't celebrate things, though if they were to, The Köner Experiment is a fitting sound for any kind of party it might throw.
