Radiohead to tour Kid A Mnesia as an installation, starting at Coachella

Radiohead have announced Motion Picture House, a touring installation built to house Kid A Mnesia, a 75-minute film made from the art Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood produced during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions. It opens on Friday in a bunker under Coachella, then moves to Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco.

Kid A Mnesia was planned as a physical exhibition from the start. The pandemic stopped that, and in November 2021 it came out as a digital exhibition instead, directed by Sean Evans and released on the Epic Games Store and PS5. The band call Motion Picture House the original idea made real. The music has been remixed from the original Kid A and Amnesiac multitracks for a custom six-channel surround system, and galleries around the screen hang Yorke and Donwood's artwork from those years at full scale.

The Coachella bunker is newly built beneath the Empire Polo Fields in Indio. It runs across both festival weekends, and any festival ticket holder can go in. Radiohead will not be there. On Monday Coachella said in an Instagram post that the line at the foot of its poster, “the Bunker debut of Radiohead Kid A Mnesia”, meant a film and not a performance. The band are not playing this year, and their last show in the United States was in Philadelphia on 1 August 2018.

In the four cities after that, visits are booked in two-hour slots, with visitors standing or sitting on a cushioned floor. The general sale opens on 24 April.

Rolling Stone says the trailer shows a horned silhouette with spindly fingers creeping across a red background towards human-like figures on white. Yorke's synopsis of the film runs to two sentences. In which a Monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost & forgotten. A relic of a time when technology could have saved us.¹

Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia, the dates as announced