Thom Yorke on NPR

Thom Yorke, Nigel Godrich and Joey Waronker, in New York for a weekend of DJing that ends at MoMA PS1, talk to NPR down the line from its bureau there and pick apart the opening track of the first Atoms for Peace album. It began after a couple of weeks on tour in 2010, with almost nothing but a few rhythm sketches on Yorke's laptop. Waronker and Mauro Refosco wrote those out in a notation of their own, “complete gobbledygook to me”, Yorke says, and played them, and Flea and Yorke answered. In three days they made so much that there is still a ton of it left.

The model was Miles Davis, playing freely and finding the art in the editing. Godrich hears the good bits as they go past, and Yorke needs ten listens. “Nigel's really fast and he doesn't allow me to go back.” The two of them boiled the jams down in England, Yorke took them away to write melodies, and the band refined the parts at Waronker's house in Los Angeles. The host's guess at the live percussion lands on a programmed passage. One of Refosco's instruments, which looks like the inside of a washing machine, turns out to be a Brazilian spring with a horn on the end.

The band started as a way to play The Eraser live, and Yorke wanted a Latin percussionist and Waronker in particular; he had first met him at an R.E.M. rehearsal after Bill Berry left. Godrich had met Waronker making Beck's Mutations and spent years telling Yorke he was the best drummer he had ever worked with. Bumping into Flea at a London show, and hearing him rave about The Eraser, got Yorke thinking about doing it properly. When he took up DJing he liked dubstep but found “there was no human element to it at all”, and heard how close it sat to old Afrobeat rhythms. A night at Flea's house playing pool to Fela Kuti was, he says, a real jump-off point.

Nothing on stage runs off a backing track. Plenty of Chili Peppers fans hated the idea of the band until they saw it play. One of the three on the line means to keep it going for kicks, not as a career. “We're going to be completely selfish about it, have a really good time, and then take a break.”