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Named after a P.I.L. song, Radio 4 revives the late-'70s/early-'80s post-punk of bands like Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, and P.I.L. by matching scratchy guitar riffs with danceable grooves. The band was formed in 1999 in New York City by bassist Anthony Roman, guitarist Tommy Williams, drummer Greg Collins, percussionist P.J. O'Connor, and keyboardist Gerard Garone, and quickly recorded a three-song EP for New Jersey's Gern Blandsten label.
Their 2000 debut, The New Song and Dance, produced by Tim O'Heir, entered Radio 4 into the ranks of gritty, guitar-driven, N.Y.C. rock & rollers. In early 2001, Radio 4 went back into the studio with O'Heir to record the 12" Dance to the Underground, which included a dance remix of the title track. The remix signaled a new direction for Radio 4, one that would mine their funky riffs and dub-inspired bass lines to create a sound that would merge rock and dance. After cutting demos in a Brooklyn basement studio, Radio 4 went to work on their second album, Gotham!, with the acclaimed production duo DFA, made up of Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy. The producers' experience with electronic artists such as James Lavelle's U.N.K.L.E. project and David Holmes, as well as bands that mix rock and electronica like the Rapture and Primal Scream, was the final ingredient necessary to realize Radio 4's genre-beating vision. Gotham!, released on Gern Blandsten in 2002, is a brilliant mix of guitars, dub, beats, squeaks, loops, keyboards, and handclaps that evokes the best post-punk dance bands like Gang of Four and gives it a modern boost of energy. The record garnered a great deal of positive press, exposure on MTV2, and expanded their fan base, both at home and in Europe, quite a bit. In 2003 the band landed a deal with Astralwerks and released an EP made up of a newly recorded version of "Dance to the Underground" plus a handful of remixes by acts like Playgroup and the Faint. The band recorded its third album, Stealing of a Nation, with producer Max Heyes in an underground studio in Brooklyn. It was released in September of 2004. ~ Charles Spano, All Music Guide
Mercora, NME ink radio deal
User-contributed online radio network will be available as MyNME Radio on Web site of UK music weekly.
The Web site of the UK's music journal of record inked a deal today to launch a branded version of a popular, user-contributed digital-radio network.
NME.com, the Web site of the weekly New Music Express, will in June launch a beta of MyNME Radio, which is being developed by Mercora, a Silicon Valley-based company that combines Internet radio and legal music downloads into a unique product.
Mercora's service mixes peer-to-peer technology and online radio in a way that many industry insiders see as a powerful music discovery tool. It includes the ability to search, find, and listen to music on the network, but the biggest selling point is that it lets users broadcast their own collection of music to others on the network, as well as browse and listen to their friends' music collections.
Mercora said its user-contributed network now includes more than 3 million unique tracks and more than 100,000 channels of music available at any given time
NME.com is owned by Time Warner. Mercora was founded by Srivats Sampath, one of the founders of McAfee and one the original employees of Netscape.
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