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.
