Kontinuum
Suitably frosty ambient sounds are currently emanating from these Icelandic doom proggers.
Icelandic quintet Kontinuum meld goth, post-rock and a blend of heavy and ambient to make an emotionally charged offering of beautiful soundscapes. From the 80s post-punk scene to gender ideas to the intense seasonal shifts of their homeland, they discuss the making of their third album No Need To Reason.
Ibeaches,celand is a country renowned for natural extremes, bringing to mind rugged black
bleak landscapes and midnight sun. It’s isolated, a few degrees south from the Arctic Circle, with a population smaller than Manchester. In the summer, the long days see 18 hours of daylight, while the harsh winters see 20 hours of darkness. For Reykjavik’s Kontinuum, who have shed their black metal roots to grapple with progressive post-punk at the heavier end of the spectrum, those intense seasonal shifts have seeped into new album No Need To Reason.
“Maybe not on the recording but I think it definitely has an impact on your mentality,” frontman and guitarist Birgir Thorgeirsson explains. “[No Need To Reason] was written across both seasons. In the winter it’s total darkness when you wake up and when you go to sleep so it definitely has an impact on the writing process. Some of the darker concepts came in one batch and then another batch was… maybe brighter.”
Thorgeirsson started his musical career as guitarist and keyboardist in Potentiam, one of the first black metal bands in Iceland to release their music to an international market. However, feeling typecast and restricted, it wasn’t long until he sought out a new band where he could enjoy a wider sonic palette. Even though Kontinuum embrace black metal tropes, they’re more defined by their palpable disregard for genre stereotypes.
“We always wanted to be avant-garde,” Thorgeirsson muses. “Even though we didn’t sound like a typical black metal band, conceptually I just felt freer – I could express whatever I felt like. I wouldn’t categorise ourselves as a prog band but we’re definitely progressive in our attitude. I appreciate being surprised – it’s a challenge to have your own identity. We would just get bored if we didn’t try to go outside our comfort zone.”
No Need To Reason, the band’s third album, was written in Iceland and recorded and self-produced in Sigur Rós’ Reykjavik Sundlaugin studio over the course of the last year – and it shows. Showcasing a bruised coalescence of fragility and despair, light and shade, ambience and crushing despondence, it harnesses the attributes of the Icelandic
seasons, fusing together elements of post-rock and black metal with a touch of icy 80s post-punk goth. Much like the violent geysers and bejewelled glaciers of their homeland, the industrial edge of Killing Joke and the glimmering underbelly of The Cure erupt and creep throughout the music.
“It’s more ambient, more fluid and natural,” agrees Thorgeirsson. “We wanted an album that sounds like what we do live because essentially we’re a live band, not a studio band.
“We were also thinking about the Icelandic post-punk scene in the 80s – you know, when Björk was screaming in a punk band. We all have these 80s tendencies and a band like Killing Joke is the one that unites us, so we had some reference to that when we started out. I think we definitely take some of that feeling, some of the atmosphere.”
In many ways, Kontinuum are a product of their environment, part of a scene renowned for its close-knit, community approach, where bands of all scenes are friends, line-ups are inclusive and the fans are just as progressive in their mindset as the musicians they love. That attitude, Thorgeirsson says, has been a crucial part of Kontinuum’s success.
“It’s a tiny, tiny scene,” he says. “You can reach everyone with one phone call. If it’s not your friend, it’s a friend of a friend. You need people that are open-minded – someone who’s hardcore black metal wouldn’t appreciate our music. But I think people today just are way more open-minded than they were. Most fans of black metal that I’ve met listen to Sigur Rós, which is the most beautiful, softest music you can hear, and you see kids in black metal T-shirts at Sigur Rós shows.”
That appetite for boundary pushing has also bled into Kontinuum’s songwriting habits. Thorgeirsson assumes responsibility for the band’s overarching lyrical concepts, and it’s his tendency for storytelling that has injected a healthy dose of prog into their records.
Their 2015 album Kyrr dealt with themes of introspective and natural-world exploration.
However, this time the concepts are heavier. “Heavy isn’t just how much distortion you use on a guitar or how loud the bass is – it’s also how heavy it is in your head,” Thorgeirsson explains. “The album is based on the future of our civilisation and the future of gender. If either of the genders might not be relevant any more, what sort of a society would that be? How would we, as a rational society, deal with that and the emotional impact of it on society, or even on religion? I wouldn’t be surprised to see there was some evidence that males might even be extinct in the future.
“I think we, as humans, have all the instincts to survive in the short-term but we fail miserably in the long run. If you look at the instincts of humans as a species, it doesn’t look very good. I think civilisation will need an updated version of our brain. We’re still wired for short-term survival.”
In these uncertain, unpredictable times, who knows what the future holds, but with their clear lust for epic storylines, we’re hoping Kontinuum are around for the long run.
No Need To Reason is out now via Season Of Mist. See www.facebook.com/kontinuumice for details.
“We would just get bored if we didn’t try to go outside our comfort zone.”