Radio Citizen

Radio Citizen is the brainchild of Berlin composer, producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Niko Schabel. The first Radio Citizen album, Berlin Serengeti released on Ubiquity in 2006, featured electronic music that employed multiple organic elements, creating a fierce sonic meld of dub, hip-hop, soul-jazz, funk, and world musics. Schabel played reeds and woodwinds, percussion, piano (including Fender Rhodes), and synth, and produced and mixed the recording. His chief collaborator was Indian-born, Portugal and South Africa-raised vocalist Bajka, but the album's selections included a large group of instrumentalists and poet Ursula Rucker. Radio Citizen's second offering, Hope and Despair, was also released by Ubiquity in the fall of 2010. The group returned in 2014 with a trio of releases: the acoustic Warm Canto EP, the soundtrack to the film The Last Catch, and Live in Brandenburg, which captured them at the city's Jazzfest that August. For Radio Citizen's third album, 2015's The Night & the City, Schabel and company moved to Berlin's Sonar Kollektiv label. The following year, Oliver Frost, Dima Studitsky, and Radio Citizen themselves contributed reworkings of The Night & the City's tracks to the Remixes EP. For their fourth album, Radio Citizen retreated to a mountain cabin in Austria to make some of their most flowing, collaborative music yet. The results, Silent Guide, appeared in November 2017. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi