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...
As supplement to Radical Research #103, on Dead Horse’s Peaceful Death and Pretty Flowers album, we present a variety of impressions gathered by the inimitable Forrest Pitts aka Fallow Heart. ...
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.” ...
Our fellow freak, Fallow Heart (aka Forrest Pitts), offers what we feel is the definitive Paul Masvidal interview. We're honored he has granted Radical Research exclusivity on this tremendous insight into one of metal's most important artists. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As a supplement to our 45th episode (first aired November 27, 2019, and always available), we present a Q&A with Manes’ Tor-Helge Skei. We said all we could possibly say about Manes in that episode, so we’ll spare you a long introduction and get right to the meat...
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...
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...
I don't do rankings anymore. With albums changing meaning and gravity over time, sometimes with each listen, it's futile to restrict them to a ranking.This year, lots of veterans caught my attention, and that's likely because many younger bands I hear are caught in a...
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...
Boy, do we love us some Isten. Issues of the Finnish fanzine such as "Twin Sister" and "Madchen" are triumphs of underground literature. Its editor, Mikko Mattila, is a bit of a hero to us, and we have always appreciated and related to his love...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We don't always listen to music, or write about listening to music, or talk about listening to music. We sometimes read about listening to music. R. Murray Schafer's 'The Soundscape' isn't simply about listening to music, but it is all about listening. Schafer takes the...
1993 represents for Radical Research a fecund year in the development of heavy metal, a tidal surge driven by forces of alchemy, science, and creative bloodshed. To substantiate this notion, we offer for your consideration a list of that year's best and brightest albums. The...
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...
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%...
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...