The Return of Radian

So much of the music we hear now is condensed into bite-size packets, with the catchy bits front-loaded to catch people’s attention before they scroll to the next thing. Thus, it’s incredibly pleasant to listen to music that is emphatically not in a hurry. But make no mistake: Distorted Rooms, Radian‘s first album in six years, isn’t lacking for action. Elements appear one after another, finding their niche and settling in to be augmented, tweaked, filtered, abstracted…and suddenly, an indeterminate amount of time has passed and you realize that you, too, have been down the Radian rabbit hole.

Vienna’s music scene is studded with unique, genre-blurring bands and personalities – Lukas König, 5K HD, Dorian Concept, even Elektro Guzzi – who all owe a debt to Radian. The trio, consisting of Martin Brandlmayer, Martin Siewert, and John Norman, was formed in 1996 and has released albums on a fairly regular basis ever since, but it’s been quite a while since 2016’s On Dark Silent Off, making the new album even more of an event than it would otherwise be.

The first single off the new album, “Cold Suns”, is – dare we say it? – a subtle banger, a little reminiscent of RZA’s soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch film Ghost Dog, Boards of Canada, and other glitchy, vertiginous Y2K-era hip-hop hybrids. Of course, none of those other bands had the benefit of Christian Reiner‘s ecstatic/spasmodic vocal outbursts. There’s a subtle but unmistakable millenial vibe here, as why shouldn’t there be? The band’s debut EP appeared in 1998, when the world was another place entirely, and they found their permanent home in the early 2000s on Thrill Jockey records, the freewheeling Chicago label with a roster of electro and post-rock movers like Tortoise and free-jazz legends like Bill Dixon, Fred Anderson, and Chad Taylor. Radian’s type of people, in other words.

But despite the band’s longevity, the music has aged gracefully…or perhaps it’s simply timeless. It’s post-everything, having seen it all but still audibly in love with the act of discovery. Martin Brandlmayer’s endless palette of drum sounds is in the foreground, processed and edited into an uncanny-valley twin of itself, while bass, guitar, and electronics – it’s neither possible nor particularly relevant to tell where one leaves off and the other begins – provide continuity, melody, texture. All of it coming from unexpected directions, like a crowded restaurant table in a dream: multiple conversations are taking place at once, everyone’s talking through one another, but somehow you can understand all of it perfectly. So close your eyes, put on your earphones, and make sure you’re sitting comfortably – you’ll want to pay attention to this record.

Philip Yaeger