The trio made up of Steve Dinsdale, Duncan Goddard and Gary Houghton play various sequencers, mellotrones, guitars, Fender Squires, Moogs and samplers all to good effect. Radio Massacre International has been playing together since 1979, first as a band called DAS, which released 12 albums between 1980-87, and have recorded together as RMI since 1993. Emissaries is a 2-CD set, the first being a studio set of 6 tracks that make up the hour long Emissaries Suite, and the second documents a live radio performance from 2004.

This trio incorporate elements of Berlin school electronics with Prog/Krautrock and are a force to be reckoned with in a live setting. "Septentrional", their inaugral release on the DiN label see’s a new approach co-ordinated by DiN label boss Ian Boddy. RMI recorded a series of three hour long improvisations which they handed over to Boddy in multitrack form. These were then sifted through, extensively edited - often in a non-linear fashion, re-mixed with the addition of synthetic percussion layers on three of the five tracks and finally reassembled by Boddy into five new pieces. The result is still definitely an RMI sounding album and captures the feel and spirit of the band but filtered through the sonic excellence listeners have come to expect from this innovative label.

RMI's Steve Dinsdale, Duncan Goddard, and Gary Houghton know how to coax all sorts of nuances from their machines, and they function as a live, interactive trio, with each member responding to the others' riffs and musical motifs. It doesn't hurt any, either, that Houghton has very impressive guitar chops, so when he eases into the mix with some blistering Stratocaster bursts, he rather convincingly updates (and improves upon) Edgar Froese's generic and rather predictable guitar flights on the seminal Tangerine Dream recordings. In a word, Radio Massacre International nail the vintage electronic music sound, but the band is simply more "nimble" than the first generation models, which greatly enhances the listening pleasure of the suitably attuned listener…if you're a musical novice unacquainted with RMI's sources, this music will serve as a stellar introduction to the form.