Radian @ Ausland Berlin | Tuesday, 08.04.2014

Following the Thalia Zedek show recently another Thrill Jockey act takes to the stage at Ausland; this time the Austrian post-rock trio Radian.

It had been four years since “Juxtaposition”, our last record and one year of a self-chosen absence from the stage, that we met again to work on “Chimeric”. This break was a necessary step to leave any routine behind us, to restructure the working process, to rethink the concept of this band and its music. It was always a driving force within the band´s history to enter new territories, like it happened with the transition from the self-titled EP to the abstract minimalism of “TG11” and finally in the more colourful rhythms of the “Rec.Extern” and “Juxtaposition” period. But this was done and we needed to go further, exploring forms and sounds we had not been dealing with so far – and adapting them to our system.

Radian | Kinetakt
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=oH9pxuWoKjA

“Chimeric” is not a polished album. Within our context it is raw, broken, even dark sometimes. Steady, multiple rhythms, layered on top of each other disappear into chaos and turn back into discreet structures in the next moment. References of rock music, executed with the precision of a sequencer; mutated, restructured. A lot on this album is about control and the loss of control. The risk of failure. This was probably always in our music, but kept in a very stable form, sometimes even hidden.

Radian | Kinetakt
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=yPRofPgEuIU

But “Chimeric” is much more free. Some of the longer pieces are composed of very different parts and different colours along a continuous timeline. They tend to evolve in a narrative form and are moving through various scenes and surroundings, which is also present in the spacial relationship between the instruments. One could see the album as one continuous story, where some elements are passed from one piece to the next and then serve as the base for a completely new scenario. The result was something unpredictable and unstable, even for us.

Radian | Brainwashed Interview
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=cgwGzzXa65M

The connection to electronic music is relatively loose. Short passages of drums, guitar and bass have been recorded live in our rehearsal space and re-organized on a computer. Like on our previous two albums, the editing process is comparable to extensive work with a tape machine. Cutting the recordings into small snippets or longer sequences, twisting and turning them around and putting them together in a new context. Pieces like “Git Cut Noise” benefit from this method. On the other hand we played whole sequences almost entirely with just our acoustic instruments like in the second part of “Feedback Mikro/City Lights”. It’s two quite different methods but most of the time we used a mixture of them. In addition, a few electronic manipulations have been made to the sound, both through Stefan’s synthesizers and Martin´s computer. A synthesizer sound has been placed on top here and there, but over all we tried to preserve the raw energy of the recorded acoustic/amplified instruments. It depicts much more the individual musicians and their energy within a moment. We left it like that, if only to keep this polarity among three very different persons.