Release date : September 26th, 2025. CD, LP and digital.
R/A/D: project founded in 2022 by Brisa Roché and Nicolas Laureau.
R/A/D: haunting duo creating collaborative slap-you-in-the-face landscapes between blues/elvin singing and drone/guitar exhalations.
R/A/D: quasi-Tantric dialogue between alarmingly raw improv, electronica, story-telling and heart-of-guitar.
R/A/D: reduction of « radical », a term used for cool/awesome in the California of the 1980s.
R/A/D: according to Brisa and Nicolas « A punk lullaby, an inner dialogue turned outer, breathing guitar, NY meets CA meets France with transformation transgender, FX, nature/mountains plus urban plus dreamscapes. FIRE and ICE. »
Outta Sight by R/A/D.
Text by Joseph Ghosn.
A joyful coincidence. This is how the two masterminds of R/A/D describe their meeting and their musical collaboration. Brisa Roché, whose long, strong, and uncompromising career is well known, recalls a concert by Nicolas Laureau, founder of Prohibition and NLF3, under his identity as Don Nino. A moment that captivated her: “I heard something familiar in the dark,” she recalls. She wondered where to buy the records by the band she’d just heard and ended up contacting Nicolas.
From this encounter, a friendship was born, and a desire to play together. Nicolas had a long-standing project simmering, a set of ideas, pieces sketched out on the guitar with a very “drone” approach. Adding Brisa’s voices to these tracks was obvious: it would take them elsewhere, into an aesthetic close to spoken word, but with many openings, something they both describe as “fire and ice”: listening to these tracks, letting ourselves be carried away by the harmonics, the voice, the breath, we’re transported into a territory of poetry and blues, of no wave and oblique pop. Here everything is possible. Probably because something youthful, by their own admission, is at play here.
“We are a young band,” say these two musicians who seem to have found in their exchanges a playfulness, a source of energy. “We make this music with the idea of having fun, and of surprising.” In fact, surprise is everywhere: in the raw and powerful spareness of the guitars, the sophistication of the vocals that move from one register to another while seeming to hover over the soundscapes, the dynamics of the pieces exploring the recesses of the psyche of the two, obsessive and intimate. Listening to their music, we want to evoke the landscapes of Loren Connors, the echoes of Throbbing Gristle, more serene and less acid, but just as haunted by the strange. Nick Cave and Karen Dalton, too, somewhere, as fleeting ghosts.
And then, there is also in this music, this sound, these pieces, something of the band that gravitates around the Prohibited label: dense and exploratory sounds, desires to discover beyond imposed boundaries. As we delve into these songs, we realize that all of this also speaks to today: Brisa Roché evokes questions of contemporary female anger, but against a backdrop that reflects the languor and length of Indian music, which offers the possibility of stopping time, suspending it, as if within the sound itself.
Hearing them speak and play, we sense to what extent, beyond the overt darkness, their music lives, resists, unfolds, and grabs you. Reflecting on it, only one way to describe it comes to mind straight from the fragments and poems of Anne Waldman: Life Notes – notes of life.
R/A/D – Outta Sight – Tracklist
1. Magenta
2. Dark Blue
3. Cyan
4. Deep Blue
5. Yellow
6. Mauve
7. Red
8. Orange
9. Pink
10. Dark Green
