Radical Research Podcast

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 at a most esoteric iteration of Candlemass. We immerse deeply in this era for Radical Research episode 14. Please join us somewhe...

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 bands clean up their tendencies toward the wandering and erratic, leading to honed, definitive albums that became legendary. His gr...

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 the stars never aligned and Mind Over Four has mostly been forgotten. Radical Research celebrates the timelessn...

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 time, they took the weirdness inherent in death metal and followed their muse to its logical (illogical...

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 come to embody for Messrs. Wagner and Ginn a cryptic and subversive narrative in mo...

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 pluck three of our favorite specimens from the ether and put them under the microscope. These albums...

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 equal measure. An outlier even in a community of dissidents, Beyond Dawn created a realm where things are rarel...

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%…Complete was met with quizzical confusion upon its release in 1998, but we feel it was always one of the band’s finest hours. We’re here to proffer evidence of its worth. A...

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 easy categorization. Their discography tests the boundaries of punk and metal and accounts for one of the most fascina...

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 for Worm , 1991) Nuclear Death – “Lurker in the Closet: A ‘Fairy’ Tale” ( Carrion for Worm , 19...

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 explorations in early Utopia, England’s high-end nutz Brand X, and Italy’s utterly withering Area...

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 of appreciation. From the gnashing death/grind of their early output to the strange emotions an...

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, just for a little while, and explore further: meet Gnidrolog (UK), Supersister (Netherlands) and Artcane (France). Note: We wonder in th...

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 the Katatonia and Opeth machines. He has approximately 24 other bands to his credit, and about 4 bazillion production/engineeri...

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 our first time in the lab. Our apologies. Our next two episodes are already recorded and edited; th...