A book called Radiohead and Philosophy.
A post on Metafilter on tilt-shift videos. Tilt-shift is the technique used in the “Harrowdown Hill” video. More here and here.
Thom Yorke explains on Dead Air Space that the new video for “Reckoner” is not new,
it’s the result of somebody entering a competition to make an animation to one of the tunes on IN RAINbows.
on aniboom. …
so we asked them whether it was ok to make it the official one we use as it goes with the song so well. they said yes.
The video:
Radiohead - Reckoner - by Clement Picon
Radiohead is giving fans the change to remix Reckoner, much like they did for Nude. Some Reckoner remixes are, dare I say, better than the original.
Colin Greenwood: “We’ve finished the main bulk of it and we’re off to Japan in a couple of weeks to finish it off.” Read more.
Via greenplastic.com and ateaseweb.com.
Thanks to Andy Bezbozhny: the August 28 webcast of Radiohead’s Santa Barbara concert is available.
Quotation:
The movie opens with a shot of dry, bare Western hills. Then we see a man prospecting for silver at the bottom of a shaft. He blasts the hole deeper with dynamite, falls and breaks his leg, and, with a titanic struggle, draws himself back up. Finally, we see him lying on the floor of an assay office, his leg in a splint, signing for the earnings that will enable him to drill for oil. The sequence is almost entirely wordless, but it is framed by music, much of it dense and dissonant. At the very beginning, you hear a chord of twelve notes played by a smoldering mass of string instruments. After seven measures, the strings begin sliding along various trajectories toward the note F-sharp. This music comes from a Greenwood piece called “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” and, although it wasn’t composed for the film, it supplies a precise metaphor for the central character. The coalescence of a wide range of notes into a monomaniacal unison may tell us most of what we need to know about the crushed soul of the future tycoon Daniel Plainview.
End quotation. Read more.
In 2004 Radiohead released The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, Twenty-four short films with music by Radiohead. The DVD, almost two-hours long, contains music videos directed by the likes of Sophie Muller, stunning video-shorts contributed by fans, an instructional but fascinating video on how to create a chickenbomb, mock interviews, odd interludes, et cetera, et cetera. Early in the DVD, a fake, comic interview titled “My showbiz life: THOM YORKE OUT OF RADIOHEAD,” Yorke gets asked all the uncomfortable questions he’s regularly asked. As it begins, Yorke quickly clarifies for the off-screen interviewer that, “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”
Though the questions delve into Yorke’s celebrity status, they get more at how that status affects money: the free, expensive gifts and shopping sprees celebrity entails. Yorke admits to accepting “a Russian egg” (likely a nested matryoshka doll rather than a Fabergé egg) from “some big fish at Microsoft” and admits to using his celebrity to get free petrol. When asked: “What’s the most money you’ve blown in a single day?” Yorke immediately emits an interjectional and embarrassed, baritone “ew” followed by a quick edit to a revealing “uh.” Yorke then stares for a long four-seconds into the camera with a pasted-on, uncomfortable grin then answers: “Six fluffy wee rabbits.” Watching Yorke become uncomfortable is discomforting. Ew, uh, and paused fake grin add up to: next question, please.
Watch. Plus an early, live studio performance of “There There.”
Piecing together the lyrics for Dollars & Cents is not easy. The sites greenplastic.com and ateaseweb.com, have incomplete or incorrect lyrics here and here. So far, this has been compiled:
there are better things to talk about
be constructive
bear witness
there are weapons we can use
be constructive
with yer blues
even when he (it?) turn the water blue
even when he (it?) turn the water greenoh won’t you quiet down?
oh won’t you quiet down?
oh won’t you quiet down?
why won’t you quiet down?
quiet down(There are unclear background lyrics here)
you don’t live in a business world
he never goes and you never stay
with all our goals in a liberal world
living in times when I could stand it, babe[ ??? ]
I could see out of here
all over, the planet’s dead
all over, the planet [ ??? ]
so let me out of hereall over, all over, all over, all over
quiet down (etc. backs the the following lyrics)
we are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence and the mark and the yen, the yen
we’re gonna crack your little souls
we’re gonna crack your little soul
we are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence and yeah
we’re gonna crack your little souls
crack your little souls
we are the dollars and cents
Please do add corrections in the comments.
Paul Lansky, whose mild und leise is sampled on “Idioteque,” is now interested in making music with objects “carved from trees or stamped from metal sheets.”
Mr. Lansky has written a new chapter, or at least a fat footnote, in the annals of artistic reinvention. A professor at Princeton, he was a pioneering figure in the computer music field and wrote one of its important programs, Cmix. (He also earned a place of honor with Radiohead fans when the band used an excerpt from an early piece.) But Mr. Lansky has abandoned the art form that made his name and has turned to more traditional composition.
Read more. Via ArtsJournal.
Quoted in full from Vernie Yeung’s video short appearing on The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time:
Checklist:
01 A Whole Chicken
For better result, get discounted chicken from any local supermarkets.
02 An Air Tight Glass Jar.
Make sure the glass jar is 100% airtight, and is big enough to to fit the chicken.
03 A Water Tank.
The Water tank must be bigger than the glass jar.
04 Plenty of Milk.
Get Discounted Milk. Make sure you have enough milk to fill up the tank.
05 A Gas Mask.
This is optional. Not necessary during the process.[Next]
01 Place the chicken into the air-tight jar, leaving the lid off.
02 Fill up the water tank with milk.
03 Place the jar into the milk, ensuring the jar is completely coverd.
04 Put the jar carefully in a warm place for six days. During this time the rotten chicken will slowly expand, and the milk will turn green/grey.
05. Place the jar in a hidden corner near Camden Town tube station. Leave the area immediately, the jar will crack at any moment, spreading a harmless foul stench into the air, causing the public to evacuate the surrounding area. If you have prepared a gasmask you can now wander around Camden Town freely on your own.
Writing about Marx and Radiohead is more of what Radiohead would say listeners shouldn’t do: think too hard about their music. In Rainbows, especially, is hard to think about without feeling you’re thinking too hard.
Compare the obscurely pointed lyrics of Kid A, e.g. “We’ve got heads on sticks / You’ve got ventriloquists,” to the lyrics of In Rainbows, e.g. “I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover.” While In Rainbows has its paranoid moments, the “closed circuit cameras,” for example of “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” the lyrics tend toward everyday, human emotions and interactions. There are no narrations dreaming of alien abduction, no mobiles skwrking, no thieves being hailed, and few, if any, allusions to Pynchon or Orwell, and on and on.
This article/extended blog posts in The Word puts it best:
The result, after a further year of work, was probably the most beautiful and even joyful record that Radiohead have made. If The Bends was about them discovering their talent, and OK Computer was about deciding what to do with it - and if Kid A and Amnesiac were about testing the limits of what a rock audience would accept - then In Rainbows put everything that Radiohead and Godrich had learned into the service of the best of human emotions.
Writing about Radiohead and capitalism is easy compared to writing about Radiohead and emotions. I’ve long avoided in this blog using the first person. I’ve avoided for years writing about what is still my favorite song, “Life in a Glasshouse.” The song makes me sad. A reader of this blog once pointed out a clear misreading I’d made of a line from “Let Down”: “Don’t get sentimental / It always ends up drivel.” I’d written that this was evidence of Radiohead’s distrust of emotion. But, as the reader said, how can you listen to this song and not become emotional, and not become sentimental? Someone who’s let down, who’s taking off and landing, who’s feeling the emptiest of feelings, would say those words and become hysterical and useless. Wanting to distrust emotions is not the same as distrusting them.
Ed O’Brien said, “On In Rainbows I liked the fact that he was writing about universal human emotions again, which he hadn’t done for a while.” I liked it too.
The post here claimed that I’d be writing on Radiohead and Marx for Radiohead and Philosophy. For personal reasons, unrelated to the book altogether (which will be excellent), I decided not to contribute.
Despite that, writing on the topic did start, but didn’t finish. It picked up where this blog post left off, turning to Marx as the best philosopher to help understand how money can, as Yorke puts it, get you by the balls. Quoted from the broken essay:
The best philosopher for understanding how money corrupts is Karl Marx. But music and Marx? Though Marx wrote nothing systematic on music, but we know he liked it, even loved it. And this music-loving Marx is the one more people should know. After park outings in London, Marx and his daughters sang their way home. Much earlier a worried mother wrote in 1835 to an ill son at Bonn University with the usual maternal cautions, but added, “Be careful also not to catch cold and, dear Carl, do not dance until you are quite well again.” We don’t know if this penchant for dance lasted after university, but I like to think it did; if not dance, then a love for music. Consider: for the greatest part of his life, Marx lived in London and one evening, feeling nationalistic after a pub crawl —one beer each at the eighteen pubs between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road—Marx is said to have harassed a group of patrons at the last stop. (And yes, a Marx in his early 40s made it through all eighteen pubs, presumably walking and not crawling.) Rumor has it Marx proclaimed: “No country but Germany … could have produced such masters as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Haydn; snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for philistines.” “Damned foreigners,” was heard and Marx, with drinking companions in tow, fled into the night to throw paving stones at streetlights.
This anecdote, remembered by Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the evening’s co-conspirators, is one of the few glimpses of Marx’s musical taste. There’s likely little rhyme or reason to what prompted a Marx deep in his cups to trot out musical composers as the height of German achievement, but we might argue in vino (and in cervesae) veritas. Marx not only knew the names of his countries’ great composers but mentioned them instead of other Germans—like Hegel, Marx’s largest philosophical influence, and Goethe, perhaps the country’s greatest writer—who’d left the most obvious marks on his work.
This vision of Marx, dancing at university and defending Germany’s music and throwing rocks at streetlights, is the best place to start. It’s best not, in Radiohead’s words, to “get any big ideas” about Marx. In other words, set aside what you might know about Marx: throw out the quotes that might be circling your head from The Communist Manifesto or your ideas about Communism or Marxism. This is even what Marx would ask; on hearing a group call themselves Marxist he said, “I at least am not a Marxist.” I admit, approaching Marx without preconceptions or context is difficult or maybe impossible—approaching a “Nude” Marx is maybe, “not going to happen.” Yet, his most sympathetic readers—people like Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edmund Wilson—all suggest this may be the best way into his difficult, dense philosophy for beginning, intermediate and advanced readers alike. If we can imagine a metaphorically “Nude” Marx—yet with wild hair and beard still in place for dramatic effect (he consciously cultivated the beard, letters reveal)—then we can rearrange the puzzle of his philosophy so at least some of the jigsaw pieces fall into place.
Marx’s philosophy might be best summed up by a sentence from a work that pre-dates the multi-volume, phonebookishly-oversized monument known in German as Das Capital. The sentence runs: “Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” This sentence, in some ways, captures all of what later writers have dubbed “dialectical materialism,” the name later philosophers gave to Marx’s philosophical outlook. But we don’t need to name Marx’s philosophy anything to understand the core of it: people exist in tension between what they would make of the world and what the world would make of them.
It is exactly this tension Thom Yorke is trying to speak about in 1997, the tension between making music and making money from that music. Even though making music has brought them money, they fear money is now dictating what music they make. Radiohead’s entire career can be read as playing out this tension—sometimes the world wins, sometimes Radiohead wins. Right now, arguably, with the digital self-distribution of one of their best albums to date, Radiohead has won the latest battle.
Here the palimpsest fragments.
Radiohead’s Aniboom has chosen its top five finalists. They are:
Reckoner v2 by virtual lasagne
Reckoner by videogruppe1
Transmutation by tstretch1976
16tracks vs videotape 2.0 by 16tracks
15 step v2.0 by KotaTotori
Late. Again. I signed up today for an account on http://www.waste-central.com/. The usefulness of the site isn’t immediately apparent. I created a Facebook group for members:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=25623882924
As part of the video, Radiohead provides a link to a 3D viewer that allows you to manipulate three different scenes from the video. As the instructions say: “Click and drag to rotate// Mousewheel to zoom.”
Aaron Meyers working with Aaron Koblin, the video’s director of technology, devised the laser technique and the video was directed by James Frost.
You can download the data: 2104 CSV files at a total size of roughly 842 megabytes, not including the application to convert the data. No one has yet to upload their own version of the video to the YouTube group.
A “Behind the Scenes” video is also available:
“House of Cards” video: http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/.
Thanks to Holotone.
On June 28 and June 29, Radiohead posted images to Dead Air Space. For example:
Pitchfork has the most detailed information on the images which are from an upcoming video: “Radiohead will be sharing data used in the creation of their new video with fans … a documentary will soon surface showing just how all this fancy stuff was done.”
Thom Yorke. Laughing?
The b-sides for In Rainbows features two moments where we hear Radiohead laugh. “Bangers & Mash” (at approx. 2:32 in) and “4 Minute Warning” (at approx. 0:58 in). Radiohead, in and since Meeting People Is Easy, has been the band that doesn’t laugh. That’s not so true. As Samuel JP Shaw put it, “Radiohead – good humoured? You’re having a laugh.” Um, yes. Another quote:
I believe that to dismiss the band as merely despondent is to miss a trick. Hail To The Thief as an album clearly doesn’t intend to present its listeners with a positive view of the world. However, the way that Radiohead present their manifesto of woe is not without a sense of fun.
Shaw has it right. Just listen to Yorke’s laugh. In Rainbows is less funny than Radiohead having fun. The songs are sexy, languorous–think of “Nude.” It’s fun, the band is having fun, and the song is funny: “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.”
Now, that’s funny.
Near to the close of Hail to the Thief’s “A Wolf at the Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.),” the lyrics run:
City boys in first class
Don’t know they’re born, they know
Someone else is gonna come and clean it up
Born and raised for the job
Someone always does
I wish you’d get up get over get up get over
Turn your tape off.
Insofar as these lyrics might remotely relate to this site, it’s necessary to at least acknowledge that Pulk-Pull* needs cleaning. Strange character strings have crept into various areas, replacing smart quotes, apostrophes, etc. Over the next week or so, shaking the rugs out will be a priority.
A new book is in the works, for release in 2009: Radiohead and Philosophy. I’ll be writing a chapter, as previewed here.
The band’s relationship to money has been on everyone’s mind, including those who thought the “pay what you want, no really” distribution method “demeans music.” But money as a problem, as something that corrupts, has been on Thom Yorke’s mind since at least 1998’s Meeting People Is Easy:
It’s like a supply and demand thing. It’s like: ‘Well, this is what they want me to do, you know, this is what they want to hear, so I’ll do more of this. Because this is great and they love me’, and that can be the demise of so many recording artists. You know, because you suddenly, suddenly people start giving you cash as well, suddenly you’ve got money and you get used to this lifestyle and you don’t want to take any risks because they’ve got you by the balls. You don’t want to take any risks because like, why, you know you’ve got all this baggage you’re carrying around with you everywhere. And you can’t let go. You know you’ve got all these things you’ve bought or you’re attached to, or, you know, if you start spending all this money.
That’s how they get you.
Just after this interview with a slightly clueless Australian journalist, shots of Radiohead in the studio attempting to record new tracks are revealing but boring, and boring because Radiohead is bored. The last song we see performed live before the credits role is an early version of “Nude,” a song then untitled. Gee shows us Yorke joking with an MTV reporter that he’d like to call the song, “Your Home Is At Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Repayment,” but he’s not sure if the title’s “catchy enough.” Yorke’s deadpan-dark humor doesn’t spark a giggle in the room, but the risk the title alludes to is exactly the sort of risk Yorke fears losing. As he said, once you’re given money for what you do, you need to keep doing what you do or risk losing what you have. But fearing this sort of risk makes one afraid to take risks, and “that’s how they get you,” that’s how the record companies crack your little soul: that’s how they get you by the balls.
And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 1725 on Saturday 19 April 2008.
Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea:
East or northeast 5 to 7, decreasing 4 or 5 later. Moderate or rough, decreasing slight or moderate. Occasional rain. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
Audio for Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea Shipping Forecast 4/19/08
Hello.
Pulk-Pull* has reopened. I closed it not long ago after some difficulties that included:
- changing host setups (from a shared hosting environment to a VPS and back again)
- an SQL dump that was larger than the new shared environment could upload (global variables set at max of 8mb when I had 25mb)
- someone hacked into the site’s new WordPress installation before I could finish setting it up (sometime within a 24hr period)
- I moved
- I got a new job
- the new album from Radiohead seemed to defy description or interpretation
- updates had become intermittent and uninteresting
- my ideas of interpretation were changing (stuck between Eco’s notion of over-interpretation and Rilke’s description of criticism as “happy misunderstandings”)
- Bush was still in office
- et cetera, et cetera / fads for whatever
During all this hubbub, I lost several posts. Several meaning 3-5 or more or less, I wasn’t counting. One, I think, is still in electronic format elsewhere.
Why “happy misunderstandings” since 2000? What does the phrase even mean?
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
-Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet.
Rilke here gets at what I felt after hearing In Rainbows for the first time. Listening to “15 Step” just after midnight Pacific time. No words I wrote down could capture that moment–and I realized I was trying to capture a moment in words, not explain how the song fit into a larger critique of capitalism and so on and so forth. And if anyone has read the site over the last eight years, you’ll know that side-stepping this “critique of capitalism” was a departure, one I barely knew I was making until it was made. The way Radiohead released this album was on everyone’s mind; how “pay what you want, no really” was going to reshape the dying music industry. But all I could think about was how fucking cool it was of them to start a song with glitchy, electronic, staticy-rhythm that mimicked The Eraser that segued with a shear drop into Phil Selway’s powerful drumming and a Smiths-like guitar layered over a bass-line backed by clapping … a song whose parts would never be greater than its whole, a whole that was both very much a Radiohead song, but also so different that I was laughing outloud while listening to children scream and trying to follow the beat on my friend’s desk and fumbling around for a volume knob. And and and. And Radiohead has … funk? Funk so wide you can’t get around it. This, ladies and gentlemen, was and is: a rock album. And as Alex Ross wrote, how rock-and-roll is it to write about rock-and-roll?
And that’s where I am, where I think some other people are too. I don’t think, anymore, you stop moving in the face of movement. So, I’ve decided, instead of thinking I need to stop, realizing it was the skin I’d put me in and I don’t need to wait for someone’s hand up my ass to move my mouth.
Blink: 1 for yes, 2 for no.
