Radio Massacre International: Emissaries (2005)

Britain’s Radio Massacre International (RMI) has got to be the greatest electronic music discovery I’ve made since buying all the ’70s classics from the likes of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. I felt electronic music really went through a dry spell by the 1980s, so much of it devolved into New Age that it got to the point anyone with a synthesizer could record New Age music and sell it. Well, this British act get sick of all this New Age being called electronic and gave electronic music that kick in the ass it really deserved, by harkening back to the glory days of the ’70s and avoiding all New Age bullshit! The group consists of Steve Dinsdale, Duncan Goddard, and Gary Houghton, all playing all sorts of keyboards, that is, analog keyboards (EMS AKS, Yamaha CS30 and CS50, Elka Rhapsody, Roland SH-3, Memory Moog, Moog Source, etc.), and tons of Mellotron, and their Mellotron work is absolutely to kill for! Gary Houghton also plays guitar, much like Edgar Froese, but I found him a much more interesting and creative guitar player than Froese ever was (Froese seemed stuck with Pink Floyd basics on guitar, and I far preferred him doing keyboards, especially the Mellotron which he simply was one of the greats in the department, as far as I’m concerned). The music is often trippy, reminding me of the more gloomy moments of Ash Ra Tempel, while at other points, the sequencers kick in and you get reminded of what Tangerine Dream was doing in the mid 1970s. Aside from TD, Ash Ra Tempel/Ashra, and Schulze, RMI’s music often gets compared to Redshift, Richard Pinhas/Heldon, and for some odd reason, which I’ll never understand, Hawkwind and Amon Düül II.

In 1995, they released their debut CD, a 2 CD set called Frozen North, and since that time, never made people wait long for a new release. They released plenty of CD-Rs to go with their regular commercially issued CDs. They even appeared on MTV’s dance-oriented Party Zone, which is a big surprise, I couldn’t imagine them doing anything but baffling and bewildering the Party Zone audience. RMI is hardly your typical, run of the mill, mindless MTV fluff, in fact, there’s completely nothing MTV friendly about their music (RMI is hardly recommended to those with short attention spans). In 2004, RMI finally got an American deal with Cuneiform Records, and the following year they released Emissaries. This is a two CD set. First disc is a studio offering, recorded Autumn 2004, in England (London and Manchester) and the second disc recorded live, May 9th, 2004, in America on a Philadelphia radio station called WXPN on an electronic music program called Star’s End. First disc is an enhanced CD, which also include a .pdf file, which you can access using Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 or higher. This .pdf file is from underground comic Matt Howarth. It’s not your typical Batman or Spider Man comic, this is a post-apocalyptic themed comic involving a nuclear winter, a madman who started the nuclear winter, and a priest in which the madman confesses his sins to. Alien invasion is also mentioned. This comic inspired the music and many of the song titles on this CD derives from the comic.

Each disc consists of two extended pieces divided into six movements each, “The Emissaries Suite” (60:00) and “Ancillary Blooms” (76:26), the former from the studio recording, the latter from an excerpt from the two hour WXPN radio broadcast (the whole two hour broadcast couldn’t fit on one CD due to time constraint, unless they wanted to finish the conclusion on a third CD, but they realized that would be a bit too much, especially since this was their first American release). “The Emissaries Suite” starts off with “Seeds Crossing the Interstellar Void”. You’ll get treated with some really trippy passages, some great Mellotron works, and then after a few minutes the sequencers kick in. Throughout you’ll hear a recurring theme that you’ll hear rear its head throughout this first disc. “Mad Bob’s Self-Inflicted Torment” has that theme rearing its head once again, but no sequencers, and I really love the trippy use of vocoders that tag the end. “The Emissaries Reveal Themselves” is another one that emphasizes the sequencers in Tangerine Dream-like fashion, while “The Ice Garden” is a more ambient, but trippy number. “A Promise of Salvation” is the shortest piece on this entire 2-CD set, at just 3:28, with that theme recurring once again, with guitar making its presence felt. A lot of the Mellotron you hear throughout this disc includes flute, choir, and big brass (the same type you hear on Tangerine Dream albums like Richochet or Sorcerer).

Disc two, the live set, consists of “Ancillary Blooms”, as mentioned. Unlike a proper live recording, you won’t find any audience cheering here. This was, after all, from a live radio broadcast, so I couldn’t image this being performed in front of a regular audience. This suite starts off with the stunning “An Interstellar Vacuum is Far From Empty”. It’s a nice ambient piece. I really like this creepy synth solo that comes out of nowhere. The rest has this airy feel, and I love how the group phase the Mellotron strings. “Mobile Star Systems” finds the band going back to the sequencers, while they mellow out big time for the next two cuts, “A Piano Wanders the Incandescent Vapours” and “Sympathy for the Bedeviled”. The song title for the former is quite appropriate, you hear something that sounds like an electric piano, done in minimalist fashion, with lush atmospheric backdrops in the background that gets you thinking of incandescent vapors. “Sympathy for the Bedeviled” has a more Pink Floyd-like feel, especially from the guitar, but still retaining that lush backdrop. The last two pieces, “The Arrival of the Seeds” and “Deliverance from Nuclear Winter” returns to the sequencers.

Really, Radio Massacre Internation is truly a force to be reckoned with. They really do harken back to the glory days of ’70s electronic music with no New Age twaddle, avoidance of MIDI equipment, and a fantastic production to go with it.

Since there’s over 2 hours of music total on this 2 CD set, it’s a lot to sit through, but the music is simply mindblowing, and it comes highly recommended!