Description
Austrian avantgarde-electronics trio RADIAN (three albums on Thrill Jockey, one on Mego) team up with GIANT SAND's Desert Country Songwriter HOWE GELB. A special collaboration of Americana with jazz and electronics.
Radian Releases: A new label founded by Radian in 2014 in order to release unique Radian projects and limited edition specialities.
Howe Gelb: voice, guitars, piano / Martin Brandlmayr: drums, vibraphone, electronics, synths, editing and arrangement / Martin Siewert: guitars, lap-, and pedalsteel, electronics, synths, processings / John Norman: bass
Music by Radian and Howe Gelb, Lyrics by Howe Gelb. Except 'Moon River' by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer
Radian is a machine – their music the sum of body hydraulics and fuzzy logic' (THE WIRE)
'... a band with impressively original density and texture' (THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Titles
01. Saturated
02. Saturated Beyond
03. I'm Going In
04. From Birth To Mortician
05. ... And Back
06. The Constant Pitch And Sway
07. Return To Picacho Peak
08. Pitch And Sway Again
09. Moon River
Press
Vital Weekly (EN · FdW · 25/11/2014)
Being stuck in the underground all the time means I sometimes have no clue about the over ground. I heard about Taylor Swift when she had her album removed from Spotify and apparently she is a million selling artist. I had never heard of her (and probably rightly so). The name Howe Gelb I may have heard before, but he's "is an American singer-songwriter, musician and record producer based in Tucson, Arizona." Oh. I do know Radian. I love Radian. This Austrian trio with Martin Brandlmayr (drums, vibraphone, editing, arrangement), Martin Siewert (guitar, electronics, he joined in 2011 and replaced Stefan Nemeth) and John Norman (bass) plays their own trademark version of post-rock, electronica and improvised music. Instruments are fed through electronics and laptop and add a real-time additional layer to the music. I have no idea what Gelb does otherwise, although singing and playing guitar seems a fairly good guess, as that's what he does here too, and Radian plays the music.
In their
usual laidback style, fusing jazzy rhythms, distorted laptop sounds, a deep bass, and Siewert's guitar swirling around it, it fits the half sung, half spoken texts by Gelb really well. A piece like 'From Birth To Mortician' takes a while before it starts; first in a smoky nightclub surrounding, before becoming more rock-like, and then all distorted at the end, with Gelb's voice really transformed. Quite a radical piece of music, but it's not always such a radical construction as on this one. Usually you can more easily recognize his voice and follow the text. It's most of the times an excellent band-like effort here, nothing that says collaboration easily. It sounds very homogenous, as it's one band playing their tunes. Great release. (FdW)
