Thorns Ltd. was founded in 2003 by the experimental musicians Snorre Ruch, Finn Olav Holthe, and Jon Wesseltoft. Its name is derived from Thorns, a Black Metal band founded by Ruch. Both Wesseltoft and Ruch are members of Thorns, and are currently recording a new album.

Thorns Ltd. is dedicated to creating experimental music and sound art. A collaboration with Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard for Playlist, a multimedia exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2004 marked Thorns Ltd.'s debut. More recently, Thorns Ltd. worked with Banks Violette on his 2005 Untitled installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Violette’s salt skeleton of a ruined church poised upon a shiny black epoxy stage evokes the "visual rhetoric" of minimalist aesthetics, while it also comments on a series of church arsons that occurred in Norway during the 1990s. For this installation, Thorns Ltd. created a complex surround-sound score that alternates between ambient sounds and extreme music, resulting in an intriguing “doubling effect.” The sound becomes a metaphysical aural landscape that, at times, follows the sculptural installation and, at other times, constructs its own independent layers of meaning.

Thorns Ltd.’s influences range from Norwegian Black Metal, which emerged in the 1980s as an extreme form of Heavy Metal rock with bands such as Venom and Mayhem. Other major influences include: the pioneering electronic music of early Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Iannis Xennakis, as well as the monotonal compositions of Morton Feldman and Gianto Scelsi, the structuralist serialism of György Ligeti, the chromatic durations of Olivier Messiaen, and the soundscapes of Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim.