Radio String Quartet

In Between Silence [2 Lp] Radio String Quartet

Viennese-based Radio String Quartet (Two Austrian, one Taiwanese and one Dutch) have offered a marvelously inconvenient word for their music: CrossoverJazzClassicPopFusionRockNewElectronicMusic'. Naturally, despite the truth it contains, this word will not catch on. Perhaps it is easier to fall back on that other critical staple, the list of influences; Nine Inch Nails, Franz Schubert, Feist, Jun Miyake, Arvo Part, Bugge Wesseltoft and Sidsel Endresen. After all that, the group are their own thing, evolving and reshaping as they feel they must, and each album, and each composition on that album will have exactly the tones and textures needed. For their first release on Jazzland Recordings, now as Radio String Quartet instead of Radio String Quartet Vienna, it is fitting that they enlisted as producer Bugge Wesseltoft, the label founder, himself no stranger to blurred margins between genres. "In Between Silence", was recorded live in the studio, but additionally enriched with self-created

samples and overdubs. On one track - Breathe - Bugge plays some piano and synths, and on another track - Echoes - the quartet even received support from techno-pioneer Henrik Schwarz. The use of voices widens the band's horizons considerably, a stylistic device which is now used for the first time on several pieces. Their new sixth album sounds like an intense and emotional movie soundtrack; it carries a rare dynamism, fearlessly experimental and full of oblique sounds (mixing experimental jazz with modern classical, ambient, folk and pop), yet still immensely harmonious and catchy. The Radio String Quartet, with Bernie Mallinger (violin, voice), Igmar Jenner (violin), Cynthia Liao (viola) and for the first time Sophie Abraham (cello, voice): "We tell the most personal stories through sound. Screenplays, translated into musical images. We play the song of life, full of chaos, energy and beauty".