Idioteque

a drum machine and a second-hand record

It started with Jonny Greenwood building a drum machine out of synthesiser modules of the kind made in the 1970s, shaping the sounds through filters. The rhythm, he decided, “needed chaos”, so he went looking for things to sample, and found them on Electronic Music Winners, a compilation he had picked up in a second-hand record shop on an American tour. He took the four chords that open Paul Lansky's “Mild und leise” and a fragment of Arthur Kreiger's “Short Piece”, improvised over them for fifty minutes, and handed the lot to Thom Yorke.

Some of it was just ‘what?’, but then there was this section of about 40 seconds long in the middle of it that was absolute genius, and I just cut that up.

thom yorke · npr, 12 october 2007

Like the rest of Kid A, the words came out of a hat, phrases cut up and drawn at random. In the second chorus the vocal is chopped and looped so that “the first of the children” falls in fives against the fours underneath it, which is why the chorus seems to slide.

An attempt to capture that exploding beat sound where you're at the club and the PA's so loud, you know it's doing damage.

thom yorke · the wire, july 2001

The critic Simon Reynolds heard it doing to modern dance music what Public Image Ltd and Joy Division's “She's Lost Control” had done to disco, and heard Yorke's trembling voice pulling against a rigid grid of rhythm.

newport

The band were playing it a month before anyone could buy it. Its first night was at Tredegar House in Newport on 1 September 2000, the opening show of their first British tour in nearly three years, in a tent holding about 10,000 people. Yorke said nothing to the crowd all night but “thank you very much”. Through “Idioteque” he danced in a tight, jerking circle. Ed O'Brien and Jonny were a blur all night, and a fan quoted in NME afterwards praised “some wicked cut-up vocals courtesy of Jonny Greenwood”.

The archive has it on 385 nights, 63 of them in 2003 alone, and 37 have ended with it.

a letter to princeton

Greenwood wrote to Lansky for permission. Lansky found the use “imaginative and inventive”, and pointed out that he had done much the same thing himself, to Wagner, when he lifted the Tristan chord for “Mild und leise”.

He told the story on his own page at Princeton, “my radiohead adventure”, written around the release of Kid A and still up. He made the piece in 1973 on the university's one computer, an IBM 360/91 mainframe, feeding it punch cards and carrying the tape to a basement lab to hear it, and the record Greenwood found sold about 7,000 copies, which Lansky joked Kid A would sell in its first ten seconds. He turned the rest into a puzzle. He would not say which song used the sample, only that it came from the first few minutes of his piece, and anyone who emailed the right answer would get an mp3 of his second computer piece, never released. What struck him, and had struck Greenwood too, was that he had been about Greenwood's age when he wrote the piece, “sort of a musical time warp”.