What exactly constitutes "Radical Research material?" We're gonna test that question with this and the next episode. With episode 148, we answer with more questions: "Is it weird?" "Is it heavy?" "Is it something we enjoy?" "Would most of the music-listening world hate it?" Yes,...
The scope of Kevin Moore’s genius begins with Dream Theater’s “Space-Dye Vest” and concludes with OSI’s Fire Make Thunder. We try to use the g-word sparingly around here, but truly, Moore’s singular artistic vision is something we attempt to hail and dissect here, for our...
Our friends Marty and Alan at the Heavy Metallurgy podcast challenged us to a duel, and we fire back. The idea was simple: Offer five different albums, any genre, to cover on an episode. Of their five, we chose the only non-metal album, the stunning,...
Herein, you will find our tribute to Pan-Thy-Monium. Briefly covered in episode 2, we finally give this very special entity its due. We dive deep into the deeps of Raagoonshinnaah’s dwelling and emerge as awed and dumbfounded as ever.Note I:At the 28:55 mark, Jeff forgets...
As noted early in this episode: we’ve always wanted to do an episode focusing on King Crimson, but couldn’t figure out the right approach. Until this idea, where we dissect and decipher all five parts of the band’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic” song cycle, spanning...
No other band with roots in Swedish death metal did it like Comecon. Not even close. We find a few similarities to Carbonized, but generally, this band is unique, special, and underappreciated enough that we had to come to their rescue for a little over...
We all know the big names of prog rock -- they're mentioned numerous time in this episode -- and we all know the music of many other names from all over the world, especially the Italian and Scandinavian progressive gods. And Holland's Supersister! But do...
This band is a major cog in the engine that powers us. We’ve said that about Voivod, King Crimson, and Arcturus, and will add Watchtower as a major ingredient of what compels Radical Research. Formed in 1982 by four maniacs whose handle on their instruments...
It has taken light years of travel, but we’ve finally reached Arcturus. For our 140th episode, Radical Research dives into the catalog of one of Norway’s longest-running institutions. Over the course of five full-length albums and a clutch of odds and sods, Arcturus has defined...
When we first announced this episode several weeks back, we received several queries from listeners all around the globe who phrased their questions similarly: "Realm? The Milwaukee Realm?": Oh yeah, freaks, the one and only. Near and dear to our hearts, as with other Wisconsin...
This short episode is one that Jeff has been promising Hunter we’d get to eventually…and we finally did. Herein, Hunter is granted 12 minutes to make a case for this lost and mostly-forgotten ‘90s alterna-metal album, 'Dead to the World' by West Virginia's Chum. Music cited...
“And she became a completely different woman…” With that line, Italy’s Monumentum sums up the Radical Research Christmas spirit circa 2025. Supernatural hokum or divine prophecy told by madmen? Either way, screw all this shopping nonsense and screw your reason for the season: this 1995...
Led by the estimable Percy Jones on bass and supported by a cast of elite co-conspirators, England's Brand X released a covey of essential fusion albums in the '70s and early '80s. Blending rock and jazz with uncommon aggression and dexterity, Brand X cuts across...
For years (yes, we've been doing this a while now), various Radical Research listeners around the globe have asked us, "When is the Dark Millennium episode coming?" For Hunter, this would have been an easy answer: Anytime! For Jeff, a crash course in this interesting,...
Listener and friend Paul Stolp prompted this conversation/episode, mentioning how he thought a “course correction” episode would be fun. What is a course correction? Paul offered the example of Judas Priest’s Ram it Down being the wipeout and Painkiller being the glorious correction. Naturally, this...
2023 marks the 40th anniversary of Voivod, a band that are at the very heart of everything we do at Radical Research and everything we listen to as incorrigible music obsessives. In celebration, Voivod released Morgoth Tales, which finds the Mark V lineup (Snake, Away,...
Although Ukraine’s Drudkh may be best known for its trance-inducing, minimalist black metal, Radical Research makes a case for the band’s divisive 2009 and 2010 recordings, Microcosmos and A Handful of Stars, which explore new sonic geographies. We believe these oft-maligned records are worth your...
Jeff got this text from Hunter a couple months ago: "Gorguts 'Nostalgia' is a fascinating piece of music. A slice of late '90s avant-death that refers to Pearl Jam, nu metal, noise rock and Indian raga. I mean, Damn!" And I responded, "I mean, damn,...
If this conversation seems easy, it's because we are back in the cold waters of our favorite nation. Herein, we dig into the good deeds of Norway's often vexing but always pleasing The 3rd and the Mortal. We attempt to peel away the band's many...
If Radical Research exists to dissect the most esoteric and weird and unique recordings in the spheres of rock and metal, then we are sorely overdue to feature the singular debut by Type O Negative. 'Slow, Deep and Hard' began life as Repulsion's one and...
This was an unplanned conversation about an unplanned, unexpected, shocking event in our lives. It’s just Hunter and I talking about a dear friend that recently passed, one of our own leaving earthly bonds. And in our reveries and remembrances we left out so much:...
When God decides to record his first metal album, he will be disappointed to remember that Obliveon already recorded its masterpiece, Nemesis, in the Year of Our Lord, 1993. On its latest episode, Radical Research conducts a much-belated investigation of the first two albums by...
Norwegian vocalist Gaahl is a man who we deeply admire...
Restless creative spirit Mat Kvohst McNerney has been roaming esoteric realms since the mid '90s, giving voice to a wide variety of bands, be it the international collective Code, Norweird supernovas Dodheimsgard, the Beastmilk/Grave Pleasures hauntings, and the incomparable Hexvessel, We feature these projects and...
Inspired by Jeff's soot-damaged, waterlogged, promo-punched copy of his treasured US CD version of this 24-song behemoth, we take an hour and 40 minutes to revel in this intensely special 1990 compilation. The epitome of the Earache label at its peak, this was a fun...
We're incorrigible Genesis fans. We hail every bit of output from 1970 to 1978. We even go further than that. But here, for episode 127, we stop and lovingly gaze at the band's final album of the '70s, the first after the departure of guitarist...
For our 126th episode, Radical Research travels to the farthest reaches of our favorite country and we do so with a rare companion, Agalloch lynchpin, John Haughm. In this episode, we dive into the discography of Thule, a progressive rock band that defies the rules...
Radical Research has risen! For our first episode following the tragic event of Jeff's house fire and the loss of members of his beautiful feline family, we have chosen to return with an exploration of one of the most emotional and intense albums of the...
What started as a joke ("send us a $10,000 donation and we'll do an episode on Bathory's disasterpiece flop, 'Octagon'!") Well, we wondered what that kind of episode would be like, so we decided to just chat about it and see what happened. No big...
As Hunter so aptly calls it early in this short episode: “Fiend for Blood is an EP that is in the process of dying.” After the classic Mental Funeral of 1991, Autopsy released the Fiend for Blood EP as its follow-up. Those who were there...
Australia’s Vauxdvihl (or, for a short time, Vaudeville) came quickly, evolved swiftly, and left behind a beautiful corpus of 19 documented songs. We have stood in awe for three decades of this short but impressive discography, and episode 123 of our weird little podcast is...
Jeff: “Was talking with my friend S. Craig Zahler a few days ago, and we were discussing Sarcofago’s 1987 debut, I.N.R.I. Zahler noted that there are some bewildering timing issues in 'Nightmare,' and how he’d like Hunter ('who is 20 times the drummer I am')...
This episode brings to a close our periodic investigations of the Steven Wilson-curated 'Intrigue' compilation. Covering progressive sounds in UK alternative/post-punk music from 1979-89, 'Intrigue' nails its intention, proving that, while traditional prog rock may have waned in the '80s, that spirit of adventure and...
In this .5 episode (the longest point-5 we’ve done to date), we offer up 6 subjects of previous Radical Research episodes and take a look at their activities since we last put our spotlight on them. (As we explain at the beginning, the sound quality...
Switzerland’s deadliest export, Coroner, which sliced and sawed its way through the metal landscape of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, has finally found its way under the Radical Research microscope. From the savage thrashing mayhem of R.I.P. to the reclined elegance of its final missives,...
A quick look at Queen’s “The Prophet’s Song,” its a cappella middle section, and the treatment it was given by one Jeff Scott Soto in various live performances. It’ll all make a little more sense when you listen… Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page is now...
Is there an album more representative of this podcast's main focus? Not outside of Norway, there isn’t. Montréal’s DBC (Dead Brain Cells) released ‘Universe’ in 1989, a tech-y cosmic opus of 37:26 that manages to cover the big bang, the evolution of life, the fall...
This is a “careful for what you wish for” kind of thing. For years and years, we hoped that we could hear the mighty Steve DiGiorgio’s bass work with more clarity on Death’s 1991 masterpiece, Human. Once we could, thanks to the 2011 reissue, we...
Operating outside of the metal infrastructure, but heralding its glory and complexity more so than most “true” metal bands, The Fucking Champs, in their 1994-2007 rampage, cobbled together elements of Trouble, Confessor, Don Caballero, and Kraftwerk and reshaped the geometric possibilities of math metal, all...
Sometimes it takes a while to come around to an album. In our case, it took 28 years with Cryptopsy’s second album, None So Vile. Better late than never. We repent!!! Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page is now set up and ready for your patronage....
The one-long-song album is a rare event in the metal genre, and a tough assignment to tackle and get right. We hold up these five albums as the finest examples of the approach. While it’s difficult to convey their scope in snippet form, we tried...
Our man Ginn loves him some Gadd! In this brief episode, we extract three of Hunter’s favorite moments by his favorite drummer on the planet, Steve Gadd. It results in something we thought we’d never do on this podcast: play a snippet of a Paul...
Pull up a chair and get your ears out! We get giddy when we’re together in the same space, which we were for this episode. You’ll hopefully forgive our exuberance and all the talking over each other in excitement of brotherhood, music, pizza and other...
In this brief episode, we spotlight the two metal bands brave enough to tackle the middle part of King Crimson's innovative and highly influential 1969 classic, "21st Century Schizoid Man." Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page is now set up and ready for your patronage....
When it comes to a difficult-to-define concept like psychedelia in music, it's subjective. It’s not all hippies with sitars and lava lamps and bongs…but that’s not wrong either. With a little help from author Michael Hicks and his parameters for what makes music psychedelic, we...
Our second in the Permeable Lines series, and our first point-5 episode since 83.5 nearly two years ago! That enough numbers for you? Join us for a brief dust-up between inspiration and rip-off. You decide. (More numbers: “18 is actually 9…it stuck in his mind….”) Note...
We celebrate musicians and bands that rapidly evolve and challenge their audience with newness each endeavor. But the abrupt left-turn San Francisco metal band Hexx took between 1986 and 1987 is beyond fascinating, and beyond the norm. It culminates in one of our favorite albums...
Radical Research can’t stay away from Scandinavia for more than a brief spell. To that end, your hosts find themselves in Sweden, digging through the short but robust initial run by Mourning Sign. Over the course of a demo, an EP, and two full-lengths, Mourning...
For our 113th episode, we dispense with the usual exhalations of the past in favor of the thrills of the tense present-future. Thief, the Los Angeles-based brainchild of visionary producer, Dylan Neal, has released one of 2024’s most extraordinary albums, Bleed, Memory, a harrowing journey...
For its 112th episode, Radical Research travels to balmy Greece to investigate the cryptic evildoing of Hail Spirit Noir, whose hellbroth of black metal, prog, psychedelia, and witchery strikes a special chord with your hosts. We take a deep look at the band’s first four...
For episode 111, Radical Research returns to its spiritual homeland of Norway. But on this trip, RR steers clear of the usual avant suspects and instead climbs the Mountains of Might to take a closer look at Immortal’s twisted and divisive fourth album, 1997’s Blizzard...
We hope this episode helps prove curator Steven Wilson’s note that Intrigue operates on the “idea that conceptual thinking and ambition didn’t suddenly evaporate after ’77…ambitious, weird and thrilling music was all around you in the ‘80s – if you looked in the right places.”...
Sigh is unquestionably one of the weirdest bands in the metal realm. And since Radical Research skews weird, and since we are both fans of Sigh since the mid ‘90s, it seemed obvious that we would eventually do an episode featuring some of the very...
An era many have written off as weak or "sell out," we cannot for the life of us figure out why! This is pure, unadulterated, unfuckwithable Napalm Death!!! ...
For a podcast that traffics in all things wild and mind-expanding, the subject of our 107th episode makes everything else feel stone-cold sober by comparison. The fifth album by Sweden's Tiamat, A Deeper Kind of Slumber, luxuriates in the wan, reclined possibilities of Leary biscuits...
Time to stop messing with the time machine and live in the present. Herein, we delve into the greatness that is Ontological Mysterium (Horrendous), In But Not Of (Afterbirth), Andermans Mijne (Laster), and The Deepening (Vemod). Metal lives? Metal lives!!! ...
For Episode 105, Radical Research follows the lead of musical polyglot and overachiever, Steven Wilson. Inspired by Wilson's recently-curated, Intrigue: Progressive Sounds in UK Alternative Music 1979-1989, this episode traces out the music found on the first disc of this four-volume edition....
We cover Diskord's three albums and one EP over 11 tasty snippets. Want obscure mindless death metal art? Here we go...
Texas terrors Dead Horse and their second album, Peaceful Death and Pretty Flowers, under the microscope...
Forged in the crucible of the Tri-State hardcore and thrash scenes, New York City's Into Another released three genre-defying albums that blend together -- seemlessly -- the disparate sensibilities of its members. The band's membership boasts a heritage that includes such stalwart acts as Whiplash and...
We started with Ulver's fourth album for our very first episode. Here, on episode 101, we restart with Ulver on our minds. Thank you Ulver and our amazing listeners for bringing us this far. We are on the run up to 200. Hail....
2023 marks the 40th anniversary of Voivod, a band that are at the very heart of everything we do at Radical Research and everything we listen to as incorrigible music obsessives. In celebration, we pay tribute by offering our longest and most in-depth episode yet,...
Radical Research has called on two of its most stalwart allies, the estimable Thomas Nul and Brian Grebenz. Over the course of almost two hours, this veritable Roman Senate chews on the hard-hitting issues that occupy the minds of all right-thinking citizens of the Research...
“Experimental extreme metal band The Meads of Asphodel believe in all peoples’ right to live in peace, free from the shackles of inflicted dogma and servitude.” ...
Is heaviness a quantifiable aspect of music? Can a piece of music display such weight, such heft, that the listener can only accept its heaviness as fact? Radical Research says “Yes,” and we are here to offer evidence....
The Southeastern United States, from whence Radical Research is broadcast, has long prided itself on its sundry wrestling traditions. From the bare-chested hectoring of the SoCon to the gator-tangling of Central Florida, southerners approach wrestling with a sense of birthright authority. But today we face...
Herein we present the third and likely final installment of our Bad-Ass Fusion Decapitations series. We repeat two bands previously featured on other episodes (Kraan, King Crimson) and bring you eight more missives from the deepest cosmos. Watch that noggin of yours -- the headhunters...
Over the course of its previous 93 episodes, Radical Research has banged, thrashed, and decapitated but never before has it waltzed. That ends now. Formed as Aslan in 1985, San Diego's Psychotic Waltz released four full-length albums in the ‘90s, each of which challenges all...
When a member of a fringe Swedish death metal band makes a request, Radical Research heeds the call. To that end, RR episode 93 is a response to Philip Von Segebaden’s (Afflicted) appeal for a song-by-song analysis of Swallowed in Black by California’s preeminent thrash...
Rarely can a rock or metal band be described in terms of open-heartedness, nostalgia, or compassion. But the subject of Radical Research’s 92nd episode defies convention in nearly every way. Madison, Wisconsin’s Last Crack was a band that seemed on the brink of breakout success...
Occasionally, Radical Research dares to tackle the big questions: what is time, and can we have a piece of it? Can a psychic saw perform brain surgery? Can a metal album have a samba track and several bars of Miami bass hip-grind? On episode 91,...
This installment finds Radical Research in familiar territory, in the wilds of Scandinavia, this time in pursuit of progressive rock luminaries, Anekdoten. Our study covers not only the group’s six full-length albums but also their inspired, ghostly collaboration with fellow Swedes, Landberk, under the Morte...
It’s the gutsier, uglier, unwieldier alternative to the heavy metal guitar solo: The goddamn heavy metal BASS guitar solo! We have collected 20 beautifully behemoth examples, laid bare for you to ponder. Sightings are rare, but they’re out there…and we love the hell out of...
We admit that, in all our geographic music spelunking, we haven’t scaled many of the mountains offered by Russian noisemakers. So, if we say that “Hieronymus Bosch is our favorite Russian band,” it’s true, but it’s also based on a slight bit of ignorance. If...
When onetime Acid Bath and Agents of Oblivion vocalist Dax Riggs took himself to the outermost reaches of his imagination with Deadboy & the Elephantmen, he reached the highest of creative and emotional heights. After the first Deadboy album (If This Is Hell Then I’m...
3 artists unknown to us, 5 snippets each, curated and confounded by Forrest Pitts. ...
Miles away from the torchlight of Norway, Austria’s mysterious Abigor spent their time in the ‘90s not generating headlines but rather plying their heretical craft in virtual secrecy. The band’s album-to-album evolutionary leaps bear the mark of restless and visionary minds. This notion is confirmed...
Radical Research spends much of its time plundering the most mind-bending sounds in rock and metal. On our 84th episode, we go several light years farther in our quest for psychic devastation as we survey and discuss the improbable body of work amassed by Chicago’s...
Metal is serious business. So why so much laughter? We don’t really have the answer, but here’s the first installment of some of our favorite metal laughs. There are more and we’ll revisit this silly topic at some future point in time. Note I: As promised in...
The soils of Seattle rock have been tilled to ruin, the same seeds planted season after season. Radical Research has come to rotate the crops. Of the artists to emerge from the primordial welter of 1980s Seattle, few have been neglected so criminally as Skin...
In anticipation of Destination Onward – The Story of Fates Warning and its publication in July, 2022, the author, Jeff Wagner, and Radical Research co-host, Hunter Ginn, sit down and talk about Fates Warning. It’s far from the first time we’ve discussed Fates Warning together,...
How California-based drummer, Dave Murray, has escaped the notice of several more tens of thousands of people worldwide, we cannot say. We recognize an extraordinary talent in Murray, not only as a musician, but as a composer and crucial cog in a small but rarefied...
For our 80th episode, Radical Research detaches itself from the icy grips of Norway and takes a sojourn southward to France, a country whose history with death metal gives priority to quality over quantity. From 1990-1994, the chronically-underrated Supuration were busy at work creating their...
For the final installment of our 6-episode Norwegian tour across this most creatively-fertile country, Radical Research surveys the career of Simen Hestnaes. Working both under his given name, as well as his better-known nom de l'acier, ICS Vortex, Simen has assembled a large and exceptional...
We love Enslaved. They are a rare long-running band that, in our estimation, have not released a bad album. Of their 15 full-lengths to date, your Radical Research hosts highly rank their sixth album, 2001’s Monumension: it’s Ginn’s #2 (just behind Eld, 1997) and Wagner’s...
To date, Radical Research has made more trips to Norway than any other country. But, typically, we spend our time in the shadowy realms of post-black metal. For our 77th episode, we travel to the green pastures of Honefoss, in search of Wobbler, Norway’s preeminent...
We know and love him as Garm, the frontman in Ulver since that pioneering band’s very beginnings. He has also fronted Norwegian luminaries Arcturus and Borknagar. All this alone would be enough to place him in our hall of infamy, yet he has given so...
At the dawn of the 21st century, strange sounds brewed in the Southeastern corner of Norway -- musical paths cobbled together with the tortured echoes of second wave black metal, the ambitious, borderless miscellanea of progressive rock and metal, and the hostile liberalism that is...
In our 39th episode, we explored the family tree of Kristiansand, Norway collective In the Woods...
12 ripping snippets from 11 fusion ragers spanning 1972 to 1982. We did the first one in 2018, episode 5, and it was high time we returned to the madness! We herewith present a variety of displays from various American, Danish, German, Japanese and Spanish...
Formed in the Czech Republic in 1987, Master’s Hammer summoned a singular, constantly mutating approach to black metal over two distinct lifetimes (1987-1995, 2009-2020). The band’s debut album, Ritual (1991), is described by Darkthrone’s Fenriz as “the first Norwegian black metal album, because it sounded...
Paul Chain’s Illogical Slow Evolution Radical Research interrogates, with few exceptions, the work of artists who operate in the darkest, most cryptic corners of the rock and metal multiverse. The music of Italy's Paul Chain, however, puts to test the inquiry even of the most rigorous...
Extant since the mid 1990s, Solefald may have been the first Norwegian black metal band to entirely bypass the necro stages of development and arrive fully formed as a "post"/"avant" type mischief-maker on their debut album, The Linear Scaffold (1997). We have watched and listened...
Often overlooked relative to Gothenburg luminaries such as At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility, Eucharist, whose entire legacy hinges upon two full-length albums and a clutch of compilation tracks, recorded some of the most vibrant, imaginative melodic death metal of the era. It’s...
The occasion of Radical Research's 68th installment could have been marked in one way only – with a full-force exaltation of music's deadliest, most head-snapping time signature, 6/8! On this episode, we survey a vast range of metal subgenres to demonstrate the ways in which artists...
With this dispatch, we descend into the catacombs to examine France's heritage of musical terror. From the spectral melancholy of Pulsar to the howling conflagrations of Deathspell Omega, this episode provides a tour across four decades of music that commits itself to the most essential...
Have you even the slightest notion of mystical reincarnation? Unfortunately for you, as for the rest of we mortals, even after spending hours with the music of Houde-era Kataklysm, it is unlikely that you will have any tighter apprehension of the matter. On this, the...
Erupting from the wastes of Tallahassee, Florida, DVC (Darth Vader's Church) produced two long-players of low-slung filth and Southside mania. From 1989 to 1992, DVC explored the most shameful, subterranean grottoes of death/thrash and did so in almost categorical secrecy. On Episode 65, Radical Research...
No anniversaries, no deaths, no reissues, no birthdays, no arbitrary celebrations. This is Hackett for Hackett’s sake! Guitarist Steve Hackett is one of the most extraordinary musicians ever to wield the instrument. Herein we present a clutch of short, sharp shocks from the man’s prolific...
There is simply nothing like Alchemist. Active throughout the ‘90s and into the aughts until their dissolution in 2010, the Australian quartet offered severe heaviness embellished by insanely loopy guitar weirdness and pounding aboriginal rhythms. Their psychedelic metal flew largely under the radar, despite linking...
Episode 62 of Radical Research challenges the notions of identity, probes at both the masks and the faces themselves. What biology occurs when the firstborn cleaves to the breast of another? This conversation claws at the God-playing reconstructions of Type O Negative, Ulver, Manfred Mann's...
Citizens of a scene that demands innovation and progress, Norway’s Dødheimsgard have assembled a body of work that evidences the evolutionary strides common to Norweird, but have nevertheless remained red in tooth and claw. Episode 61 provides a comprehensive survey of Dødheimsgard’s work, from the...
We at Radical Research have made a habit of descending into the vortices of profound sound, but our adventures with the musical hijinks of Helios Creed make most other sojourns seem, by comparison, like empty gestures. On our 60th episode, we divest ourselves of empty...
Even in the bizarro wilderness of Radical Research, Alf Svensson’s Oxiplegatz stands out in its peerless freakishness. A founding member of the epochal Swedish death metal band, At the Gates, Svensson used Oxiplegatz as a conduit for his most perverse cosmic fantasies. Built on a...
If the wild, transcendent music we exalt were a cluttered yet beautifully arrayed galaxy, the artists making that music would be planets and Rush would be its sun. So much of what ticks off all the right boxes for us is inherent in the music...
Germany’s Atrocity have been plying their execrable goth-metal wares since 1994’s precipitously tragic Blut, but the band’s first two albums, 1990’s Hallucinations and 1992’s Todessehnsucht (aka Longing for Death), occupy space in the top tier of death metal’s golden age. Wild, technical, psychotic, and destructive,...
“If you think it’s pretentious, you’ve been taken for a ride” With this episode, we look at the second half of Genesis’s 1974 double-album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Garnering a mixed reaction upon release, it eventually grew into a mammoth cult classic. But it...
Herewith we present an overview of one of the most beguiling bands to emerge from American soil. Part doomed epic metal, part gothic grandeur, peppered with prog, and very much in the spirit of our other chameleonic favorites, we run through Hammers of Misfortune’s works...
part 1:In which Hunter is assigned a 7 Degrees of Separation task, with these parameters: begin in Norwegian metal, end in Norwegian metal. Betwixt, he was free to roam. We start at Ivar Bjornson (Enslaved) and end with Morty Black (TNT). Hunter’s route is circuitous,...
We love to draw lines and conclusions. We hear links and threads where there may be none, or, on a good day, where we might just be onto something. And we love Norway, especially its music. Especially the weird metal stuff. And we have always...
A journey through a wilderness of Nembutals and Luciforms, The Mars Volta’s fifth album offers up a radical departure from the itinerant mania of The Bedlam in Goliath, to explore the inscrutable, dream-like vistas of the interior mind. Though songs like “Teflon” and “Cotopaxi” puncture...
Continuing our appreciation for the unloved misfits of Metalopolis, we always considered 1992’s Thresholds, by Florida’s Nocturnus, an honorary 1993 album. Until we found out it was recorded in December 1991. Whatever the case, these eight chunky, blocky, cosmic, technical songs find Nocturnus at its...
Storming the gates with a new wave cover tune, borrowing from Baudelaire and sampling from NASA Apollo transmissions over primitive machine pulses, Swiss pioneers Celtic Frost exploited terrain no metal band had before with their third full-length album. Created under constant stress and duress in...
Many bands have professed to play death metal, but few have summoned the power of death itself, have forced the very bowels of earth to erupt. Nuclear Death, the lords of their own putrid hell-scape, emerged from the sun-scorched wastes of Phoenix, Arizona to ply...
For the second time in a matter of months, your intrepid hosts find themselves in the frosty arms of Trondheim, Norway, this time to investigate the world of the frustratingly private Albino Slug. Known to few but adored by those who do, Albino Slug’s legacy...
After firing up a band called No Man Is An Island (later shortened to No-Man), a young Steven Wilson corralled a couple friends and some wild ideas to sculpt homespun cassette recordings under the strange name Porcupine Tree. These then-obscure tapes, Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm (1989)...
Bust out the Purell and take a healthy dose of penicillin because the whores are back in town. On this special -- and occasionally-recurring -- episode of Radical Research, we stroll alongside a pornographic buffet of sumptuous synthesizer vibrations. For this globetrotting, sweaty-browed sojourn,...
For the 45th episode of Radical Research, we continue our trek north, this time landing in Trondheim, Norway, where we take a close look at the vast and fascinating discography of Manes. Well-respected in black metal circles for their personal and visionary approach to the...
When Uranus falls, once and for all, in the cosmic background will be heard the humming, buzzing sound of a tragically-overlooked group of travelers. Formed in 1988 in Turku, Finland, Xysma waged a decade-long war against expectation and small-mindedness. With phantasm-like stealth, the band moved...
After recording two mind-bending and defiant albums -- pieced together, ever so precariously, with the bacterial molecules of metal, ska, contemporary music, free jazz, musique concrete, tango, imaginary soundtracks, and the music of the Middle East -- Mr. Bungle returned to the table in 1999...
Emerging from a web of poststructuralist philosophy and electronic fetishism, France’s Heldon -- whose name is derived from Norman Spinrad novel, The Iron Dream -- functioned from 1974–1979 as a vehicle for Richard Pinhas’ wildest aural fantasies. The group’s first six albums work through an...
Welcome to the second installment of this occasional episode in the margins...
Let’s face it: we live in a world bereft of justice. And so it falls on the shoulders of Radical Research to shine a bit of light into this dim world. On this, our 41st episode, we give a voice to the voiceless and spotlight...
Departing from the tractor-beam blasphemy of their seminal first four albums, Bergen, Norway’s Gorgoroth offer a more panoramic approach to (a career in) evil on their daring fifth missive, Incipit Satan. IC absorbs influences from death industrial, morbid rock and roll, and melodic death metal,...
Greetings from the nativity. This podcast began as an examination of the vast and nebulous frontier of Norwegian post-black metal. In that spirit, episode 39 of Radical Research probes the tentacles of the In the Woods...
Toby Driver’s path to the present has been circuitous and inscrutable, which is to say, in keeping with music he has written over the last 25 years. His work in Maudlin of the Well, Kayo Dot, and as a solo artist has encompassed metal, chamber...
Writing about Devil Doll is like skating about horticulture. Led by the deeply enigmatic Mr. Doctor, and purposely shrouded in the thickest mystery, Devil Doll’s music disappoints even the keenest taxonomist. Experimenting with metal, classical, and progressive rock, Mr. Doctor and his revolving cast of...
Melvins’ career -- a vast, still-expanding 36-year odyssey across the full spectrum of heavy and experimental sound -- is marked by goalposts, some triumphant, some deviant. On this episode of Radical Research, we train a critical eye on 2002’s bellwether, the curiously-named Hostile Ambient Takeover....
The so-called “Canterbury scene” was an adventurous musical movement of time and place, bonded tightly by shared influences and an incestuous genealogy. This episode, we climb our favorite limbs from the Canterbury tree, including but not limited to Caravan, National Health, Egg and Quiet Sun....
It began with suffering and ended with screams (and whispers). St. Louis' radically-progressive Anacrusis never enjoyed the recognition they so deserved, but popular neglect did little to temper their potent vision. A product not only of the ‘80s thrash scene but also of the fertile...
Men Behaving Badly: Trashed Productions What is music if not sound? In episode 28, we discussed the mathematical properties that have shaped some of rock and metal’s most extraordinary albums. In episode 33 of Radical Research, we expand our investigation into the controversial, often divisive,...
In less than 10 years’ time, Michigan’s maddest scientists, Thought Industry, built a five-album discography that drew upon every available atom and protein in the rock and metal corpora. From the mutated post-thrash of its debut, Songs for Insects, to the melancholy, cosmic vistas of...
Crawling out of Manchester to work strange machinations on the English psych-pop era of the late 1960s, Peter Hammill and Van Der Graaf Generator’s sonic architecture was a mirror to that decade’s creative promise and a murder of its utopian ideals. They documented their deeds...
We here at Radical Research like a good departure. Whether that means the beginning of a vacation or the sixth Journey record, departures are just good for the soul. And so goes the third record by Germany’s Deathrow, Deception Ignored, which constitutes a break from...
Under the guidance of bassist Ralf Hubert, Mekong Delta’s initial phase featured a revolving door lineup of Euro-metal luminaries. Adopting pseudonyms and lurking unseen in shadows, Mekong plied a brand of progressive metal that drew inspiration from composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Aram Khachaturian and...
As Pythagoras mused, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” So too is there magical energy in the shapely contours of the most mathematical rock music. In this episode of Radical Research, we trace...
A Skeptic’s Universe is what happens when student becomes master. Spiral Architect’s school years were spent in obscurity, honing their craft, learning their lessons, keeping their noses to the grindstone. In 1998 they began work on their master’s thesis, and in early 2000, upon publication,...
Angular, adventurous, and apocalyptic in nearly equal shares, few bands scratch the collective itches of Radical Research like Victoria, British Columbia’s Nomeansno. From their punky beginnings to the nuanced terror of their mature work, Nomeansno trafficked some of the most dangerous and dexterous rock music...
Pytten’s Chamber Music: Black Metal in Grieghallen As the ground began to swell in early ‘90s Norway, a shadowy figure known to metal fans only as “Pytten” (ne Eirik Hundvin) ensconced himself in Bergen’s Grieghallen Studio and began to document the work of the country’s Young Turks....
Emerging from the swampy wastes of Florida, Nasty Savage created a body of work built on the inimitable vocals of Ronnie Galetti (aka Nasty Ronnie), hammering percussion, and a harmonic guitar language that has yet to be replicated. This episode of Radical Research takes a...
This game originates from one Jeff plays semi-regularly with our pal Tim Hammond, where CD-Rs fly back and forth between the Boros (States and Greens), and one has to puzzle out the other's mystery tracks. It's been an effective way to both discover new stuff...
The possibly despicable term “art rock” is where pop, prog & rock meet, with a generous layer of quirk embedded throughout. Art rock is pop without restraint, prog with good table manners, rock stretching its creative fibers beyond the norm. And yet, gray areas...
It would be inaccurate to say that Germany’s Pyogenesis is underrated because, in fact, they have hardly ever been rated at all. Over the course of their career – which is still in process – Pyogenesis worked across a wide swath of genres, including death/doom and alternative metal, before...
Meet the creatures Plotkin & Dubin, instigators of some of the most beguiling music ever beamed to Earth from a New Jersey-shaped quasar. Like the guy in the petri dish on the Musical Dimensions… album cover, your puzzled Radical Research hosts consider the bizarre landscape...
From the dark past, in the light of freezing moons and through funeral fog, Mayhem reappeared in 1997, under cover of night and to relatively little fanfare. Wolf’s Lair Abyss, the band’s first release since 1994’s epochal De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, reveals a fiercer, future-forward...
Goodbye clarity, hello obfuscation… Norway’s other post-black metal duo, perhaps dwelling deeper in obscure shadows than Solefald… we hail Fleurety’s dedication to the dark arts and… which craft? All the ones that bring metal to the most precarious of left-field edges. So bizarre that it...
From a kernel to a cosmos. Over the course of a decade and beyond, Germany's Grobschnitt twisted and bent and stretched a piece of sound that would be known as "Solar Music." An alchemical collision of Prog, Krautrock, psychedelia, and uncanny theater, "Solar Music" represents...
The second in an occasional series of brief ambushes. With this mini-episode, we ponder and marvel at similarities between a certain few musical passages. Prompted by our previous episode on Afflicted, we compare/contrast moments of uncanny similarity, one of which is too close for comfort....
Prolific for a brief few years, with curious beginnings and a mostly ignored ending, Afflicted’s supernova burned brightly at its peak. That peak, Prodigal Sun, is the essential cornerstone of Afflicted’s output and is explored in depth here. Psychedelic, transcendent left-field death metal lunacy from...
Few things in life get the hosts of Radical Research as excited as the squishy, otherworldly sounds of the analog synthesizer. For our 16th episode, a special detour from our typical musings, we sort through the decades in search of some of the deepest, wildest,...
Can you sense them? The ghosts? Quiet yourself for a moment. They hang in the air and whisper in our ears. They taunt us with memories of a golden age. Listen closely and you can hear the spectral voice: "1993." They mock the sterility and...
Had Leif Endling disbanded Candlemass after 1989’s Tales of Creation, he would have given enough to place his band in the halls of metal infamy. But the bassist pressed on, enduring lineup shifts, label hassles, and changing times, to eventually arrive in the late ‘90s...
There are no happy accidents or lucky mistakes in Rick Rubin productions. The legendary producer knows exactly what he wants and how to get the leanest, meanest performances from each artist he works with. In our examples, he wielded a decisive guiding hand in helping...
For our 12th installment, your intrepid hosts sift through time and dust in search of Orange County's Mind Over Four. Bridging an unknown gulf between cutting edge alternative rock and hyperkinetic tech/prog metal, Mind Over Four was poised for a breakthrough to the mainstream. But...
Death metal is very weird musick. It’s the rupturing and restructuring of musical tradition. At its best it offers otherworldly, phantasmagoric deliverance. We begin this episode hearing Carbonized in its embryonic stages as an exemplar of the peculiar Swedish death metal substrata, but in short...
The 10th installment of the Radical Research odyssey pries into the amorphous body of work that has been known to your hosts privately as "Ginncore." Based around a loosely-connected confederacy of artists -- mostly American and mostly active during the difficult-to-define ‘00s -- Ginncore has...
Rock Progressivo Italiano (RPI) was a remarkably fertile, prolific progressive rock movement of the 1970s. Italy’s compositional and performance acumen rivaled England’s more popular scene, and its output exceeded it. Your Radical Research hosts are mad for the stuff, and with our ninth episode, we...
Join us on an extended tour through the curious world of Norway's Beyond Dawn. For thirteen years, Beyond Dawn occupied a shadowy, distorted universe of their own making. Rather than scowl at the moon, Beyond Dawn chased phantoms through pitiless cityscapes and fairytale grottos in...
Wishful Dreaming: A Study of My Dying Bride's Urban Detour Join Radical Research hosts Jeff Wagner and Hunter Ginn in a spirited discussion on the fifth album from English death/doom maestros My Dying Bride. 34.788%...
Band in the Trees: Among the Ruins of Die Kreuzen Episode 6 of Radical Research finds your intrepid hosts deep-diving into the discography of Milwaukee's cult heroes, Die Kreuzen. Over the span of a decade, Die Kreuzen created four records that propose a hostile challenge to...
Radical Research 5.5 is the first in an occasional series of brief ambushes. Super-trivial stuff that’s too fun, weird and/or interesting to ignore, but undeserving of a full episode. For Radical Research diehards only! Music cited in order of appearance: Nuclear Death - “A Dark Country” (Carrion...
Ten blasts of springtime joy before the scorch of summer. This is the Radical Research strain of fusion, corralling some of the baddest asses within the larger prog/jazz/fusion/rock heliosphere. From NYC giants Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, we veer into decidedly deadly territory through...
Episode 4 of Radical Research explores the surreal work of Austrian metalunatics, Disharmonic Orchestra.* Our conversation exposes the psychic tensions and psychedelic grottos of this extraordinary band, one whose music was ignored largely during its heyday and continues, for the most part, to be bereft...
Episode 3 of Radical Research covers three progressive rock bands from the glorious ‘70s era that often don’t come up in the usual ‘70s prog conversations. But they should, and this is our little way of correcting that. Please drop your prejudices and Yes albums,...
The second episode of Radical Research dives into the strange world of Sweden’s Dan Swanö. From his neo-prog roots in Unicorn to the way-left-of-center Karaboudjan, and bedrocks Edge of Sanity and Pan-Thy-Monium, we are usually in awe. Swanö has also been a crucial cog in...
For the inaugural episode of Radical Research, we delve into the mysterious, magnificent William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998), the fourth album by Norwegian shape-shifters Ulver. Note: The sound quality of RR1 isn’t exactly superb, especially Jeff's mic in the intro. This was...