Radical Research Podcast

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%…Complete was met with quizzical confusion upon its release in 1998,...

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...

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...

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...