Opal Island, the new album by London's Konntinent, would fit nicely on a Venn diagram with fellow drone artists Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Black to Comm. The primary overlap point would be a knack for microscopic detail. Using an array of oscillators, arpeggiators, and crazy sounds you can't easily place they gather errant scraps of instrumentation and noise into uncanny wholes. But when we say "drone," don't think dark and dense-- this is lively, diverse music.
Konntinent is a little more forbidding than his peers, but his sound world is just as wonderfully kaleidoscopic. On Opal Island, brooding guitars add delicate melodies to micro-electronic mirages. Rhythms are jagged, but feel purposeful and fluid. There is plenty of peculiar, splintering noise, but almost no murk: The record simply wouldn't work without the clear production, which captures the unique curve and heft of each sound. Konntinent's materials aren't just drones, hums, and disarticulated tunes; but also glitches, unruly microphones, the muffled roar of blank tape. Clicks and pops embellish the melodies, and scraps of extreme frequency swallow up portions of signal. He ranges broadly over the stereo spectrum, creating sub-rhythms with hard pans to immerse the listener in a spacious, unevenly shifting sound.
While each track is made of similar, elusive materials, the atmosphere often changes, from the opiated death disco of "44 55 33" to the slack guitars of "Frost Fair". The tracks shapeshift so gradually you barely notice it, though momentous changes occur in almost every one. Voices occasionally pop in: Konntinent's own grayscale murmur, and a winsome turn by Lisa Madisson on the calming "Dry Eyed". To call these effects dreamlike is clichéd but correct-- you're in one place and then, suddenly, another. People appear, say incomprehensible things, then vanish. On the margin of deceptive banality, extraordinary events flicker. If you like hearing the esoteric pleausres of sound art rendered tangible, intuitive, and explicity emotional, Konntinent is as rewarding as the best of his peers.
