RADIAN

Martin Brandlmayr / drums, electronics, editing and arrangements
John Norman / bass
Martin Siewert / guitar, lapsteel, electronics

Radian are a trio from Vienna who've built up a formidable reputation for their incredible live performances and records that draw influences from an impressively eclectic range of approaches and genres. Their releases on Thrill Jockey blend the traditional instrumentation of rock music with electronic impulses and extremely minimalist, abstract textures that play with structure - building and contorting into new shapes as they go.



"When you listen to music, you’re recognizing harmony, feeling rhythm, relating to its mood. But sometimes you’re also doing something much more primitive — as when you hear a sharp yell or a squeal of tires or glass breaking. You’re thinking: What was that sound? And how close is it to me?

Radian, a trio from Vienna, creates music that plays with your sense of aural identification and aural distance. It goes in hard for little sounds we make when we’re not quite yet “making music”: the tiniest flop and swish of wire brushes on a drum-head, the quick pop of a plug entering a socket or a circuit being switched, the sound of a finger depressing a computer key. On “Chimeric,” its fifth album, those little noises pan across the speakers or create a compound rhythm, arranged by post-editing into elegant, complex syncopation, each portion of the rhythmic cycle expressed with different volume or compression or room tone.

Since the band’s beginnings, the timbre, shape and resonance of Martin Brandlmayr’s drums have been its trademark. (He’s a wonder: a drummer with a beautiful sound and feel who pushes back against his own virtuosity.) Those human touches, his perfectly timed, rhythm-conscious strokes and rustles, are surrounded by all kinds of other incidental noises, both handmade and digital.



There are also sounds on “Chimeric” that imply grandness and distance, and push you away. Where before it had only used drums, synthesizer and bass, now Radian suddenly has a guitar fetish. This instrument, as played by Stefan Németh, can produce dry, unamplified strums, as on the piece “Subcolors.” Or scrubby, slate- gray clouds of distortion, heaving across your field of sound, as in “Git Cut Noise,” and coming close to the twinkly ambient-doom of bands like Nadja or Jesu.

What is this group up to? Radian’s music can sometimes sound like free improvisation, but it’s composed at microscopic levels. It can have a sense of rock dynamics, building a big emotional crescendo toward the end of “Feedbackmikro/City Lights,” but on the whole it has little in common with rock. It uses some crowd sounds and attunes you a bit to its process, but it’s not really musique concrète. It’s alive with interlocking clicks and hums that can approximate dance beats, but it falls short of body-oriented funk. It’s always a stone’s throw from a recognizable style." - BEN RATLIFF (New York Times review of Chimeric)


WILL GUTHRIE

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics. He studied jazz and improvised music(s) at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia and alongside Ren Walters he started the weekly concert series 'Improvised Tuesdays', now known as the Make It Up Club and is Australia's longest running performance space dedicated to experimental and improvised musics. In Nantes, France he is part of the collective CABLE# which also organizes regular concerts and an annual festival. He also runs the experimental improvised CD label and mail-order service; ANTBOY MUSIC.



He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, in minimalist/maximalist free jazz trio THE AMES ROOM (with Jean-Luc Guionnet & Clayton Thomas), in appalachian mutant folk duo ELWOOD & GUTHRIE (with Scott Stroud), as well as the electro/acoustic improvised/composed ensemble THYMOLPHTHALEIN (with Anthony Pateras, Natasha Anderson, Clayton Thomas & Jérôme Noetinger). Regular collaborators past and present include Erell Latimier, Keith Rowe, David Maranha, Ren Walters, Jean-Philippe Gross, Greg Kingston, Helmut Schafer, David Ades, Mark Simmonds. Will currently lives in Nantes, France.

will-guthrie.com


DAVID MARANHA

David Maranha was born in Figueira da Foz in 1969. His work comprises sculpture, music and architecture. In 1986 he started to develop his work as a musician both solo and with several bands having release more than 30 albums since then. Maranha formed “osso exótico” in 1989 with André Maranha, António Forte and Bernardo Devlin. With a regular and extensive live and recorded activity both in Portugal and aboard, David and his brother André have maintained this band from the creation till now with multiple collaborators, being its current formation composed by André Maranha, David Maranha, Francisco Tropa, Manuel Mota and Patrícia Machás.

Maranha has collaborated with many musicians such as Z’EV, Emmanuel Holterbach, Helena Espvall, Phill Niblock, David Grubbs, Akio Suzuki, Will Guthrie, Andrea Belfi, Jochen Arbeit, Minit, Pete Simonelli, David Daniell, Arnold Dreyblatt, Jacob Kirkegaard, Carla Bozulich, Chris Cutler, Werner Durand, Robert Rutman, Ben Frost, Helge Sten, etc.

davidmaranha.blogspot.pt