It’s been a good five years since we last heard from Austrian experimental trio Radian, purveying processed electronics and avant funk in 2004’s cool as a cucumber Juxtaposition. In the postrock firmament of Vienna, however, they’ve hardly been at rest. Drummer Martin Brandlmayr, keyboardist Stefan Németh, and bassist John Norman have been indefatigable culture workers, tending to solo material, other bands, label business (Németh’s own Mosz Records) and the odd video art project. Brandlmayr, in his work with Autistic Daughters and Polwechsel among others, has solidified a reputation as one the finest, most relentlessly precise percussionists around.With so much musicianship and production chops at Radian’s disposal, one’s first impression upon hearing the harsh, cut up notes and static that kick off ‘Git Cut Noise’, the bracing overture for new album Chimeric, is that these three gentlemen have made a concerted effort to dirty up the signal path. "Chimeric is not a polished album", say the liner notes, attributed to all three musicians. "Within our context it is raw, broken," they write, before adding with considerable understatement, "even dark sometimes." You don’t say. The epic ‘Feedbackmikro/City Lights’ begins as if in an abandoned factory with indeterminate slime dripping from disused machinery. Brandlmayr’s hypnotic clang pattern propels us deeper into some kind of boiler room where the aura of menace is palpable. Then somebody switches on the machines, and we realise we’ve stepped into a lift. As Radian loudly pull us up the scaffolding, crossbeam-impeded vistas of a nocturnal, quite possibly on-fire metropolis rattle by.This sort of cinematic drama marks a step away from the clean (if still sometimes abrasive) laptop jazz of Juxtaposition and 2002’s rec.extern, and an even greater distance from the chilly minimalism of their 2000 full-length debut, tg11. Yet even with its heightened sense of narrative, Chimeric lives up to its name, evoking a jumbled composite beast that, as on previous Radian releases, is the product of many hours of editing after the fact. The result can feel randomly put together at times, as chimeras must inevitably be to some extent. As a North By Northwest cropduster buzzes overhead toward the end of the title track, for example, a blast of synth and percussion suddenly rushes underfoot; we’ve just stumbled near the edge of a great chasm. It’s a confounding moment of startling beauty, and not a little fear. As dark and mixed up as Chimeric is, it couldn’t work any other way.

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