Radian is the second Vienna-based band signed to
Thrill Jockey to feature the talents of percussionist
Martin Brandlmayr. Brandlmayr's other band is the
improvisational combo Trapist, but while Radian share
a certain openness of outlook with Trapist, they're
less about exploratory excursions, and more concerned
with a skewed version of staying on the one. This band
focuses its energies onto a kind of sleek, modernist
funk that pulsates with the tension of internal
conflicts being played out, culminating in a series of
dynamic conclusions. Recorded by John McEntire in
Chicago and by the band in Vienna, Juxtaposition
presents a series of taut workouts that nevertheless
maintain an open-ended quality. Just as the music
appears to settle into a rhythmic pattern, it suffers a
series of ruptures: random invasions of electronic
tics, purrs, and hisses, and sometimes severe
interruptions as gaping holes are torn in the fabric
of the band's sound.
Radian's music is very physical — the vibrations of
the snare drum, the feedback sounds of guitar and
electronics, the dry, upfront bass — yet also
caustically cerebral, a soundtrack to some abstracted,
sodium-lit, dystopian urban narrative. This is not
street-level romanticism reconfigured to be endlessly
recycled, but rather a displaced sound combining grime
with grace, future shock colliding with tech-noir in a
tangle of existential confusion. Here questing improv
gives way to a more directional form, where the
glacial coolness of the rhythmic flow rubs up against
the willful disharmony of grimy electronica. Within
this broad schematic, there is plenty of variation.
Radian can be both sinuous ("Vertigo," "Transistor")
and jaggedly, erratically insistent ("Rapid Eye
Movement," "Helix"), with occasional nods to denser
abstraction — as demonstrated with the piercing tones
and seismic rumbling of "Ontario." With "Tester" the
music coheres into a loose, jazzy logic, and "Nord"
skirts the closest to melody, its dream-state
punctured by harnessed feedback sounds and noise
edits. The music keeps crossing, and re-crossing, the
boundary between noise and rhythm, with the spatial
neatness of its momentum forced to coexist with the
relentless, piston-pulse of machine logic and the
erratic, violent interruptions of white noise. Utterly
modern and utterly compelling. |
