Ed O'Brien pitches Blue Morpho and his live shows at 432 Hz

Blue Morpho, out today on Transgressive and the first album Ed O'Brien has released under his own name, is tuned to 432 Hz instead of the standard 440, and he tells Stereogum's Chris DeVille that his live shows will be at 432 too. He retuned his piano for it and had Vintage Vibe build him an electric piano at that pitch, the first the company had made. The idea goes back to a conversation about the Solfeggio scale at Glastonbury in 2014. He believes most music was pitched at 432 until the end of the 19th century, and that A=440 only became the standard around the Second World War.

Talking by video from his home in Wales, he traces the record to the second lockdown. The first had been sunny, almost a novelty; it was in the second that he went down, and he spent nine or ten months working through it, helped by birdsong, walking and the cold water of the Severn. He puts that stretch beside fatherhood among the great journeys of his life.

Paul Epworth produced the album, with Riley MacIntyre co-producing. Philip Selway drums on two tracks, because O'Brien heard them and said they needed him. The strings on “Blue Morpho” and “Sweet Spot” are by the Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits, whom a festival promoter seated next to O'Brien at a dinner in Tallinn. O'Brien says Jonny Greenwood usually makes careful mock-ups of his string parts in Radiohead. Kõrvits preferred to skip them, recorded the strings in Tallinn, and was surprised by how loud they ended up in the mix.

He says Selway follows Thom Yorke's rhythm and the rest of the band follow Selway. With the sound of Radiohead, I think there are two really distinctive things. I think it's obviously Thom's voice, but also Philip's drums.¹ O'Brien sits out the opening of “Pyramid Song” on stage, so he gets to watch the others play it, though at last year's shows in the round Selway had his back to him.

“Pyramid Song” came up at Saturday Night Live in 2000 too. The band had flown in for the show, and on landing at JFK heard from their manager that Kid A was number one in America. On the night they played “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque” with the record's horn players, who wanted to know how anyone counts “Pyramid Song”. O'Brien told them I don't count. I just feel it¹.