Niko Schabel, the Berlin composer, producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, conceived Radio Citizen as his central project. Its debut, Berlin Serengeti, appeared on Ubiquity in 2006 and merged electronic textures with abundant acoustic elements to fuse dub, hip-hop, soul-jazz, funk, and assorted world musics. Schabel performed on reeds and woodwinds, percussion, piano including Fender Rhodes, and synthesizer, while also producing and mixing the sessions. Indian-born, Portugal and South Africa-raised vocalist Bajka served as the principal collaborator, yet the album drew on an expansive roster of additional instrumentalists plus poet Ursula Rucker. Ubiquity released the second album, Hope and Despair, in fall 2010. Three further projects surfaced in 2014: the acoustic Warm Canto EP, the soundtrack to the film The Last Catch, and Live in Brandenburg, recorded at the city’s Jazzfest that August. For the third album, The Night & the City, issued in 2015, Radio Citizen switched to Berlin’s Sonar Kollektiv label. The next year, Oliver Frost, Dima Studitsky, and the group supplied reworkings for the Remixes EP drawn from that record. To shape their fourth album, the musicians withdrew to a mountain cabin in Austria and produced some of their most fluid, collective music; Silent Guide emerged in November 2017.
