There is no one way or one genre to accurately describe Radiant Devices’ music. On the surface, art rock seems sufficient. The group’s music is noisy and quirky at the same time, then the guitar lines and riffs build from steady and melodic to harsh and uncomfortable. Maybe trip-hop is a more fitting term based on the densely packed rhythms. But how would that account for the general weirdness of a sound that feels more indebted to the avant-garde than the industrial backbone of Bristol that built trip-hop?
That unclassifiable sound is what makes Radiant Devices — led by Fyodor Sakhnovski and Mojdeh Stoakley, as well other musicians the two collaborate with from time to time — so compelling in the first place. “We talk about things conceptually quite often and we don’t marry ourselves to genre,” Stoakley said.
The band’s music sounds like the past, present and future all at once. A lifetime of music fandom seeps through in track after track.
Sakhnovski’s love of metal and industrial can be heard in theatrical guitar flourishes, and he admits that those two genres are the music he listens to most often.
And the group’s dense lyrics and quirkier sound experimentations might draw strongly from Stoakley’s mind. She went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a poet and artist by trade. An instrument is never just an instrument and a lyric is never just a lyric.
“We use melodic instruments to behave like rhythm instruments instead of as melodic instruments,” she said. This includes Stoakley’s voice, which guides the syncopation of each track.
There are numerous artists of the underground (and slowly, the mainstream) who have adapted a hungry, free-for-all of music consumption in creating their own unique sounds. Those artists, like Radiant Devices, are much more interested in what works best for the artistic vision they’re attempting to execute more than restricting their ideas and visions to one genre.
“We talked about the sound from the beginning, and we knew what we were going for, but as we kept moving, we got more and more refined,” Sakhnovski said about their decisions. He previously played in groups that left him creatively unsatisfied. “I wanted the sound to be more adventurous and explorational than the bands I was playing in at the time,” he said.
After Sakhnovski and Stoakley formed Radiant Devices, they had conversations about their new music’s energy, building each track organically as it best corresponded to their vision. “The process begins with an idea or a concept and then we try to realize it through music and words,” Stoakley claimed.
They’ll often switch off instruments from song to song or drop an instrument entirely if it doesn’t match their ideas. No time is wasted on elements that don’t or can’t tell the desired stories. “Defining the sound wasn’t randomly fooling around with things,” Stoakley added. “There’s no way for us to create art without doing so from a conceptual framework.”
As for the future, it can be found in everything else they add to their music. Their upcoming releases include two EPs that “talk” to each other conceptually. The first EP is a conversation about dehumanization and trauma. The second looks at what it is like to come out on the other side.
Radiant Devices also plan to incorporate a variety of artists from different mediums. Like the band’s efforts in crafting songs, the members are much more interested in what works conceptually for their shows than just presenting a run-of-the-mill rock concert.
“Though we realized the music is the bedrock, the rest of the work depends on other elements,” Stoakley said.
Future performances might take place in art galleries or at happenings. Expect poetry, dance, elements of performance art … basically anything that works best for the song and the story they are trying to tell. “We’re interested in exploring ideas,” Sakhnovski began, “and coming up with ideas more than just simply writing rock songs.”
When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: The Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave.
Tickets: $10 in advance, $12 at door (21+); 866-777-8932 or emptybottle.com
Twitter @chitribent
