Radian - On Dark Silent Off

A Closer Listen

Radian announces itself with a squelch and a blur.  It’s been seven years, and where has the time gone?  Soon those big beats (and we do mean BIG) hit their stride, the beeps bounce like water in a Jurassic Park puddle, and it seems like 2009 all over again, only better.

Radian’s blend of organic and electronic, composed and improvised, lends the trio a distinctive sound.  In many cases what seems to be live is actually manipulated, the architecture hidden by studio splicing.  These and other dichotomies are suggested by the title On Dark Silent Off, which implies opposites.  But the set does contain one unifying characteristic: it grooves.

While the bass and electronics each make powerful contributions, the snares define the tone.  Mixed up front and loud, they dominate the sonic field, threatening to obscure even other percussive elements ~ a sampled marble, a cable entering a socket.  The rubbed chalk sound of “Recreate Loved Objects” is especially appealing.  While each track contains non-percussive portions, the energy picks up each time the beats appear.  Single “Scary Objects” begs for club action, or at least a chase scene.

If the set’s most avant-garde piece is “Codes and Sounds” (the shortest track, yet the furthest thing from a single), then the most immediate is “Rusty Machines, Dusty Carpets” (the snazziest track, yet much too long for radio play).  Here the trio demonstrates the breadth of its abilities with crashing drums, booming bass and a sense of abandon.  The sound is free-form, but the construction is not.  However, the track, and by extension the album, does have a downside: a momentum-killing five-minute empty spot seven minutes into the track.  We’d have ended the album here, as the coda is unnecessary.  But this is a minor quibble, as five minutes of silence is far better than seven years.  (Richard Allen)

Release date:  11 November

Available here

The Quietus

Having come to life when the Austrian capital was something of a hub for new strands of glitchy electronica at the turn of the century (see Fennesz), instrumental trio Radian have been on a steady journey inwards. Since the sparsely engineered sound structures of their debut (on Vienna’s own glitch hub Mego) back in 2000, Radian’s albums on Thrill Jockey over the last decade-and-a-half have steadily pulled themselves together. Like cosmic nebula the music has slowly collapsed inward, forming tighter, denser compositions on every album.

Though largely comprising bass, drums, and guitar (plus the odd synth), the trio have never sounded much like a real ‘band’ on previous recordings. They more often resemble a laptop musician or single collagist hard at work. It lies in the process behind their songwriting, where rather than riffs and melodies, music is written around happenstance chunks of sound. They’ve often focused tightly in on the sort of sonic detritus engineers spend their careers erasing from the studio: bass hum, fretboard scrapes, the accidental tinkle of a snare rim or cymbal stand, the pop of a jack leads getting plugged in. It’s kept the heart and soul of the players at an arm’s length throughout their career, rendering them somewhat coldly as sound scientists completing strange musical jigsaws from pieces that really shouldn’t fit. On Dark Silent Off somewhat shifts the balance, seeing the players pour a bit more of themselves into music that is more of a living breathing human-machine hybrid than any of the albums it follows.

Aptly for a band that tend towards pockets of silence, On Dark Silent Off follows the largest gap in the trio’s studio time yet - a full seven years lie between this and 2009’s Chimeric. The intervening period saw departure of original guitarist/synth player Stefan Németh, replaced by nimble German guitarist Martin Siewert (who amongst other things plays with Mats Gustafsson in indefinable trio Fake The Facts). The lineup shift is pretty seamless though, and this certainly picks up where Chimeric left off. That album had several moments of near-post-rock crescendos miraculously emerging from glitchy beds of guitar hum and drum kit scrapes. Those moments felt like they’d been a long time coming too, the rhythms of drummer of Martin Brandlmayr having grown increasingly busy and groovy over a preceding decade of activity, and bassist John Norman more often weaving hooky lines to latch on to.

So now we hit their most approachable album yet. It’s unusual for a recommended entry point into a band’s discography to be their fifth album in sixteen years, but On Dark Silent Off could undoubtedly win Radian new listeners. It holds far more easter eggs for fans of guitar music than any previous release, and collects more than enough krauty grooves to keep the Julian Copes of the world happy. All the while it also retains the goods to delight any weirdos keen on that inhuman sparsity and alien bleeps of their previous work.

‘Pickup Pickout’ kicks off the album with some typically humming guitar, electronics, and vibraphone hums, but Brandlmayr’s nimble drumming kicks in within record time. The stereo field flutters with bleeps, pops, and buzzes, but the core of the tune is an outright jam of funkified snare hits, muted guitar plucks, and yearning bass lines. It’s as if Radian found their inner Can (circa Ege Bamyasi). In fact, the way Brandlmayr handles his sticks takes me back to the disappointment I felt listening to the many Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit collaborations. Having fantasised about a searing marriage of glorious ‘Halleluhwah’ grooves and 21st century electronics, it was a let down to get served such an aggressively mediocre series of sessions. On Dark Silent Off is far closer to the exciting kraut-tronica I’d lusted after just like that hip dude at the Jon Hopkins show in a Neu! shirt.

What they describe as this “microscopic” method of ‘zooming in’ on sounds - i.e. building tracks around snippets of fluke hums, bleeps, and taps - has two key effects on the music. First of all, it wields an amplified sense of closeness and intimacy rarely heard outside of Blue Note jazz. You feel like a gnat landing on a tom drum would come across in the recording. Secondly, it leads Radian’s compositions (like they always have) treading unpredictable routes. Largely jettisoning more strictly tessellation chords and melodies in favour of sonic lego bricks one could assemble into just about any form makes for some strange suites of non-sequiturs and jagged surprise turns. The title track wanders from a subtle glitchy humscape to a jangly minute or two of plucked guitar beauty (even replete with an acoustic guitar), then segueing into a rumbling crescendo of distorted bass, snare, and processed tones. With music like this, repeat listens always prove hugely rewarding, enabling stirring new passages and sounds to all of a sudden emerge, as if they’d been written in disappearing ink.

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The Free Jazz Collective 100

Pitchfork 80

Over the course of their first four albums, Radian perfected a painterly approach to sound construction. What makes the instrumental Austrian trio exceptional is its ability to wrest seemingly endless possibilities by fine-tuning the grain of every sound. On their fifth album On Dark Silent Off, Radian take the tactile dimension of their music even further while also introducing groove and drama basically for the first time. On Dark Silent Off bristles with a passion that you don't hear on their back catalog. It's not like past Radian records are stiff, but the band always sounded slightly removed as it supplied you with a constant flow of sensory input. This time, they connect with your heart too.

On Dark Silent Off begins much as Radian's other albums do, with two minutes of instrumental textures building into a half-organic, half-synthetic hybrid: electric guitar chords strained through an amplifier, a bleeping electronic pulse, and drum sticks establishing a pattern on snare. As usual for them, the overall tone feels, if not cold, then at least impersonal, an exercise in modernist architecture that privileges audacity of form over comfort. This time, the band relied heavily on transducers to project sounds onto various surfaces, a process not unlike replaying tracks through an amp or studio monitor to increase the feeling of spatial dimension. When new guitarist Martin Siewert plays guitar chords, it feels like you can reach out and touch the grill covering on his amplifier. You can hear air moving behind Siewert and Brandlmayr's array of electronic noises. If the music on On Dark Silent Off had been painted on a canvas, you'd notice the detail in the brush strokes from twenty feet away.

But right around the two-minute mark of album opener “Pickup Pickout,” Radian switch into an actual groove, like a post-rock interpretation of a techno banger. Out of nowhere, the music starts to pant, sweat, and move. The sudden rush of humanity is startling. The song ends with a repetitive, pulsing digital loop, and by that point Radian have covered more ground in one piece than they have on some of their entire past albums. In the same vein, a piece like “Recreate Loved Objects” unfolds like a suite, almost a mini-album unto itself, as its somber single-note guitar line traverses a shifting landscape of sounds. Suffice it to say the album doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them.

Radian's brand of art rock has always gone down surprisingly smooth in whole-album servings, but they've outdone themselves on every level here. More limber and fiery than ever, the band has risen out the experimental cul-de-sac with a riveting work that should appeal to both its expected audience and to new fans who might have otherwise dismissed this style of music as too antiseptic for their liking.