A Closer Listen
Is Distorted Rooms rock or electronic? Is the music improvised or composed? On Radian‘s new album, loud sounds become soft and soft sounds become loud; guitar lines are cut free from their moorings; loops and layers intertwine. Each track becomes one of these Distorted Rooms, where the walls are always moving and the furniture is in flux. Even the cover image is spliced, a visual reflection of the music.
This Vienna trio is interested not only in the ways in which music comes together, but the ways in which it can be taken apart and reassembled. At times their music approaches glitch and click ‘n’ cut, pointillist and precise. Every note is exactly where it needs to be; we imagine the members have very neat houses. The percussion as heard may not be live, but the “best pieces” of a live recording dissected and sampled. In like fashion, some of the percussive sounds come from sources other than drums. One can hear the process on opener “Cold Suns;” when the fuzzy guitar enters, it creates a contrast in perception. An unwieldy drum bar emerges at the halfway point, seemingly performing a duet with static. The result is akin to a microburst.
The very use of the word “Cold” is carefully chosen, as is the decision to begin every title with a C or an S, two letters whose pronunciation is sometimes identical, other times distinct. The three S tracks follow the three C tracks, with one pair set against the other, most clearly in “C At The Gates” and “S At The Gates.” The former introduces a particularly memorable steel drum segment in the fifth minute, an S in a C song. The track fades into a helicopter whirl. The latter launches with a heartbeat, introducing high pitches and chimes, a C in an S song. If John Cage had ever been on “Sesame Street,” his segment might have sounded like this.
“Cicada” offers the album’s most immediate call to the dance floor, although two rooms seem to have complementary DJs: distorted bass and determined drums on the upper level, half-time jazz on the lower, one level the sleeping cicada and the other the cicada rising. All sound stops at 4:29, and when the breaker is tripped, the track sounds completely different from its opening, although the transition has been so gradual it has been hard to notice in real time. “Skyskryp12” shifts from electronic to rock across its duration, leaving an impression of crumpled paper unfolding.
Do six distorted rooms make a distorted house? At the end, every plank is in place, every screw secure. The rooms may be distorted, but the house is now in focus. (Richard Allen)
Sun Sep 17 00:01:08 GMT 2023