Radical Research Podcast

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 by the group’s radical reinvention of itself in the mid-aughts. The 85th episode of Radical Researc...

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 Gigan. As forbidding and violent as the character from which it derives its name, Gigan’s music blends savagery and psychedelia with 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 episode, here’s a link to a wealth of laughs by Mr. King Diamond. Praise be to the person who built this insane collage. https://www.yout...

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 Yard. The band's membership forms a constellation the likes of which can hardly be rivaled -- Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Gruntr...

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, but it’s the first time we’ve gone into an episode of Radical Research with absolutely no plan. We didn’t even know what s...

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 selection of projects. In our 81st episode, we try our best to give Murray his due. You can do your job by lending an ear to our musin...

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 own, private death metal universe, in which brutal churning, otherworldly melody, robotic vocals, and psyc...

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 body of work that stakes claim in the metallic regions of black, doom, prog, avant, and beyond. Episode 79,...

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 #1 (in front of Isa , 2004). Curiously, it was perhaps the most lambasted, misunderstood and contentious of Enslaved’s early...

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 progressive rock export. Having made five albums since forming in 1999, which at once pay homage to the legends of the '70s and occupy...

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 much more. Through a variety of cameos and side projects, Garm, or Kristoffer Rygg, or Trickster G, has stamped his white-hot brand on a variety of ot...

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 indigenous to Norway’s pioneer enclave. Operating outside the radar of media glare, and attracting scant attention ev...

In our 39th episode, we explored the family tree of Kristiansand, Norway collective In the Woods... Here, in our 74th episode, we go straight to the source to explore and exalt the work of In the Woods…, proper, between 1993 and 2000. Over the span of three full-length albums and a series of 7" singles, In the Woods... set about documenting the bucolic wonders of its homeland, charting astral voya...

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 artists. Rip it apart!!! Note I: Here’s the first installment of this occasional series: https://www.radicalresearch.org/episode-5-ten-bad-ass-...

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 incredibly Norwegian to many of us.” We celebrate the entire discography and, with this epis...

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 and probing minds. For our 71st episode, we engage in a mystery jukebox journey through the vast and often-treache...

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 from our perches as Cornelius Jakhelln and Lazare Nedland have evolved, escalated, provoked and pontificated through m...

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 that second album that we zoom in on with episode 69 of Radical Research, those luxurious curves of the band...

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 as disparate as Realm, Order From Chaos, and Solefald have deployed 6/8 to maximum effect. Keep the ibuprofen and Be...

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 - and essentially Gaulic - notions of Grand Guinol  and Fin de Siecle . We beckoned the uncanny, the psychically...

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 66th episode of Radical Research, we peel back the lacerating layers of one of Canada's most confounding exports. The music that Kat...

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 opens the grave and digs into this band's modest but fascinating body of work. Join us on this...

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 output, just a sampling of the curious magic he’s capable of. Hackett hacked to bits. Indulge! Note I: Please...

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 with Relapse Records in the second half of their career. Radical Research brings y...

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 Earth Band, and Gorgoroth, among others. To do or to undo? That is the question. Note I: Correction: Jeff qu...