How come nobody thought of this before? It is an ingeniously simple recipe: mix up jazz, glitch, and noise - and voilà, you have the "Portishead of the digital movement", in other words, a relatively easy entry point into the music of noises. Furthermore, Radian is a real band, unlike the numerous Austrian guests at Avanto before (Pomassl, Philipp Quehenberger, Alois Huber, Fennesz, Pita, Hecker, farmersmanual, Skot). True, drummer Martin Brandlmayr also plays the computer, as does keyboardist Stefan Németh, but John Norman doesn't stray from his bass. As with many artists of the Viennese school, you can sense, behind the original and seemingly simple basic idea, quite a lot more - cultural history, lots of hard thinking, and skill of the highest order.

Radian developed their style way back in the end of the previous century, but probably due to their slow recording frequency, it is only now they are attracting some attention. For instance, The Wire wrote of the latest CD Rec.Extern, produced by John McEntire of Tortoise: "On this showing, Radian are true virtuosi, and Rec.Extern is a masterpiece of sculpted sound and daring psychological manipulations." Still, instead of sculpture, a more fitting point of reference could be architecture. Radian have been frequent collaborators with video artists, mostly in rather abstract circumstances. On the rare occasions, where the video material has been documentary, it has dealt with mainly marginal urban spaces like industrial districts. Also, the sampled sound snippets, used by Radian in a superbly sparing way, lend themselves to creating an atmosphere of empty factory elevators and nocturnal open-plan offices.

With Radian you can hear how the players listen closely to each other in the best traditions of free improvisation, and use changes in dynamics in an extremely expressive way. For the dramatic pauses and pregnant silences, many critics have even made comparisons to traditional Japanese music. Among the cognoscenti, Radian also have a reputation of being an outstanding live band.