Idioteque

a drum machine made out of modules

It started with Jonny Greenwood building a drum machine from synthesiser modules of the kind available in the 1970s, shaping the sounds through filters. The rhythm, he decided, “needed chaos”, so he went looking for things to sample.

What he had was a compilation called Electronic Music Winners, picked up in a second-hand record shop on an American tour. Off it he took the four-chord phrase from Paul Lansky's “Mild und leise”, written in 1973–74 at Princeton on an IBM mainframe, and a fragment of Arthur Kreiger's “Short Piece”. He wrote to Lansky for permission. Lansky found the use “imaginative and inventive”, and pointed out that he had done much the same thing himself by lifting the Tristan chord.

Greenwood recorded fifty minutes of improvisation and handed it over.

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” lands in five against the four underneath it, which is why the chorus feels like it is sliding.

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

what people made of it

Simon Reynolds said it “does for the modern dance what PiL and Joy Division's ‘She's Lost Control’ did for disco… the track works through the contrast between Yorke's tremulous hyperemotionality and the rigid grid of rhythm”. NME called it “a brilliantly persuasive two-step litany of paranoia, fear and unease”. Others heard a weak imitation of Aphex Twin's “Windowlicker”, and said so.

Pitchfork and Rolling Stone both later named it one of the songs of the decade, and Rolling Stone put it at 48 in its 500 greatest songs of all time.

the one that detonates

It was first played in Newport on 1 September 2000, sixty-four times in 2003, and it has closed thirty-seven of the archive's 386 nights. It is the point in the set where a Radiohead show stops being a rock concert.