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Net Feature/ Konntinent: "All Lines Lead In"

  Tobias

Thomas Raukamp, editor in chief of “Beat” (the Magazine I write a monthly column for) dropped me a six-word note the other day, which read as follows: “Hi. Check Serein. Sensational new release.”. Over at the label’s site, though, it seemed like business as usual. The online outfit responsible for introducing the world to artists like Herzog remained as composed as ever: “It is always a pleasure to introduce a new name to the site, and Konntinent is no exception.” The pleasure, in this case, is ours..

For it takes London-based Antony Harrison just four tracks of spheric emotional melancholia to mark him as one of the names to follow and as a huge talent in the the pleasantly indeterninate ether between soundscapes and composition: “All Lines Lead In” is as much filled with empty matter as it is with harmony, as much driven by pulsation as it is by stasis, simultaneously determined by the rules of logic as by intuition and both smiling and shedding a tear at the same time.

To be sure, Harrison fills silence gracefully with noise and creates delicate forms and shapes from the vacuum. Crackling fireworks haunt the coda of the title track, but they seem to come from someplace else, as if sounding out the end of a dream. It is the most quiet piece on an EP filled exclusively with very quiet tracks and a touching high to a work which moves at snail’s pace but carries you far, far away.

Part of the attraction of “All Lines Lead In” lies in its mimicry of organic processes: Human breath in “Grasp of Math”, awakening in “3 of 8 of 4” and gradual growth in “nasse”. Harrison seems to restrict his job as a composer to setting a group of basic initial paremeters and then observing them create structures both planned and random, only carefully influencing their course and deciding unsentimentally on the moment of their ineascapable decay.

It is this free-flowering spirit inherent to all pieces here which lends them their uniquely floating quality. “All Lines Lead In” is an invitation into a galaxy of private gravitation, a travellog from a trip to the centre of your heart. It is up to yourself, not the egoistic will of the composer, to decide how much it can mean to you. That, not necessarily the elements this outwardly simple music is made up of, warrants the notion of this being a sensational release.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Serein Netlabel

Homepage: Konntinent