Thom Yorke tells how the Suspiria score began with a breathing synth

Thom Yorke tells the story of the Suspiria score in the interview he recorded with his session at Electric Lady Studios in New York on 19 November, which KEXP has published in full today. The session itself has been going out on American public radio since 4 December.

Luca Guadagnino, the film's director, chased him for a while. Yorke was intrigued, backed away, and at first thought the idea mad, never having made a soundtrack. They met in a London café, where Guadagnino talked about breathing. Yorke went home, read the script, set a synthesiser to breathe and rattle like a person, sent Guadagnino about nine minutes of it and said he was in. My assistant, she came into the studio genuinely freaked out saying, 'What the hell is going on?'¹

Jonny Greenwood had told him he would get a lot out of making music before he had the picture in front of him, and he did. The only film writing he had done before was “Exit Music (For a Film)”, for which Baz Luhrmann sent him a 20-minute videotape of scenes from Romeo + Juliet.

“Volk” had to fit a dance Damien Jalet had already set on mathematical lines. Yorke borrowed Jalet's threes, fives and tens, though not as Jalet meant them. The film's editor, Walter Fasano, freed him by suggesting the stomps and breaths of the dancers. The drums that come in at the end are played by his son Noah.

“Volk” was also Yorke's first real go at surround sound. With his co-producer Sam Petts-Davies he mixed parts that slip in and out of time and travel round the cinema, into the ceiling and the floor. At the Venice premiere it felt to him as if the room changed.

“Has Ended”, with Noah on drums again, started from a piano slowed down until melodies came out of its overtones, and Yorke sang over one of them. He calls its words much more political: 1977 was in his mind, but so were Trump, the beginnings of fascism and troops coming home to confetti.

“Suspirium” is his first waltz. It's a waltz, for God's sake. That's not very rock'n'roll.¹ Part of it comes from a poem read when his grandfather died, about not having gone, only being in the next room. “Unmade” grew from a title and some chords, for a scene where Guadagnino wanted something sweet and the scene is anything but. Yorke was only won over when singers from the London Contemporary Orchestra sang it.

Next he is trying to finish the record that has grown out of his live show with Nigel Godrich and the visual artist Tarik Barri. I'm supposed to complete a commission for some friends of mine, the Labeque sisters, virtuoso piano players. Which is amusing because I can't read music¹