Thom Yorke scores Stanley Donwood's The Panic Office with 18 days of music

Stanley Donwood's The Panic Office opened at Carriageworks in Sydney on Thursday 21 May with new music by Thom Yorke playing through it. Subterranea, which Yorke made for the exhibition alone, is 18 days long and, the organisers say, no minute of it is the same twice. There are no plans to release it, so the only way to hear it is to stand in the room before the show closes on 6 June. Broadsheet gives its full name as Subterranea Version II and says that once the show is over it is to be wiped from every iPod it is on.

Triple J's reporter at the launch described ambient textures, experimental sounds and field recordings, closest to the ambient side of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and to the music of PolyFauna, Radiohead's app, with a few digitally spoken passages in the manner of “Fitter Happier”. It plays over three levels of speakers, and the press release promises that subs will boom from the floor, mids will echo through the walls, while the highs rain down from the ceiling².

It is a full-scale Australian show of Donwood's work, presented by the art and design conference Semi-Permanent, whose curator Murray Bell had been asking him for six years. Semi-Permanent's ticket holders see it first, and after that entry is free to anyone.

Donwood, a friend of Yorke's since their student days at Exeter, has made Radiohead's artwork since the “My Iron Lung” single in 1994. He built the show with the Sydney design studio D3 as a fortress inside a Carriageworks warehouse, spray-painted, fly-postered and clad in corrugated iron. He calls it a punk version of an Iron Age stockade fort⁸. Thousands of pieces from 25 years of his work hang there, many of them for sale. Every one, Donwood says, is a reproduction or a print, framed in deliberately cheap wood. Each album has its own room, its final art beside outtakes never shown before, and there is a Goat Room that can be seen only through a peephole.