Album Review – My Brother Daniel & Anton Mobin – “Radio Buddha”

Radio Buddha is a new collaboration album between electronic improviser My Brother Daniel and radio art connoisseur Anton Mobin. The two met and team up on the Itsu Jitsu net label this August for a transatlantic improvisation spanning either end of the radio dial.

My Brother Daniel is the recording project of Scott Buchanan. Located in Massachusetts, My Brother Daniel has built a small following around a local radio show, dj residencies, and live improvisations producing a wide variety of sounds, moods, and instruments.

Anton Mobin is the pseudonym of Anthony Baron a sound artist and radio producer working in Paris. Anton Mobin follows a similar path to My Brother Daniel as both an artist and community producer working in radio, improvisation, and collaboration.

Radio Buddha is delivered in four ‘scenes’ drifting between radio waves, silence, drone, and static pulses. The album’s creation resembles ideas similar to John Cage’s 1959 work ‘Indeterminacy’ with the improvisers performing in different rooms unable to hear each others sounds (Radio Buddha’s sounds imagine David Tudor was playing both parts of Cage’s piece). Often you are left with areas of meditative drones and flickering static to later be buried in avalanches of rhythm and speech collected from all over the radio dial.

The sounds develop slowly and are introduced in a restrained setting throughout “Scene 1:” Buddha Machines hum and purr, radios pulse in irregular rhythms alternating between signal and noise, the dials are tested from end to end. Later in “Scenes 2+3,” the voice of the radios relax and drone through radio silence until they pop into signal and find radio station samples at their most obtuse, reminiscent of the stranger areas of a Nurse With Wound record. The confidence of these two improvisers shines through clearly in the control they maintain on their individual rigs; neither artist tries to outshine the other and no one sound generator takes control for too long.

Radio Buddha is the first collaboration between My Brother Daniel and Anton Mobin and is a great display of both of their talents as sound artists and community building collaborators. The four scenes of Radio Buddha could be a prologue for either artist to continue releasing new and interesting experiments separately, or perhaps Radio Buddha’s explorations have left room for a sequel.

-reviewed by SUN RAD