Russian Circles recorded a session for KEXP in August and the station has now put the whole thing out. Four songs: Deficit, Harper Lewis, Empath and Eluvial.
A radio session is an odd fit for this band and that is what makes it worth watching. The format exists to put a singer in front of a microphone and a host beside them, and there is no singer here. What the room has to carry instead is three players building volume without anybody explaining it.
The choice of songs spans most of their run rather than selling one record, which is also not how these sessions usually go.
KEXP's sessions have become the standard reference recording for a lot of bands, because the sound is better than a festival feed and the performance is closer than a studio take. For an instrumental band whose records are built in layers, playing them in a room with three people is the harder test of the writing.
The band have been running since 2004 and have made this music with no vocals across their whole catalogue, which is rarer at this level than the number of bands who try it suggests.