Konntinent

London experimental musician Antony Harrison, working under the Konntinent moniker, forged a singular strain of guitar-driven drone that merged Raster-Noton-style glitch, atmospheric post-rock, and abstract pop songwriting reminiscent of Radiohead. His densely assembled sound environments typically incorporated spectral vocal traces, field recordings, chimes, swelling strings, and exacting edits, yielding results that felt simultaneously unsettling and full of unexpected turns. Harrison launched the project in 2007 via several digital EPs and scarce CD-R editions. Its first proper album, Degrees, Integers, appeared on the Japanese label Symbolic Interaction in 2009. The following year brought Arev Benn, a limited tape on Sweat Lodge Guru, a split CD-R with Fonogram on Awkward Silence Recordings, the bright and psychedelic Down with Candy on Debacle Recordings, and Opal Island, his debut for the U.K. label Home Normal. That album stood as his most concentrated statement to date and met with strong approval. Afterward Harrison issued a raucous full-length under the Arev Konn pseudonym and formed the experimental pop duo Paco Sala with vocalist Leyli, which delivered two cassettes and two LPs on the Digitalis label. In 2012 Konntinent released the limited LP Kiruna on Hibernate and the wider-reaching Closer Came the Light on Home Normal, with early copies including the bonus disc Should We Make It Through the Night/Wayside in restricted quantity. Harrison ended the Konntinent project in 2013 to focus on Paco Sala, yet he authorized Home Normal to put out The Empire Line—an album finished in 2010 and planned as the follow-up to Opal Island—in 2015.