Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors

loops from the manor

Some of it is older than the album. Colin Greenwood told Kodwo Eshun in May 2001 that the track was made on a Roland MC-505 groovebox with loops, some of them found loops the band had recorded at St Catherine's Court, the country house near Bath where they made OK Computer.

The method there was crude on purpose. They set up tape recorders with the erase heads disabled, so the record head kept laying new sound over the old, and played keyboard notes into them until a ghostly repeating melody built up. Colin set that against the Roland's harsh electronic noise and admitted they picked these machines up without knowing how they worked.

Ryan Reed, writing for Ultimate Classic Rock in 2021, traced the loops to a demo of “True Love Waits” from the same era, and to the “True Love Tape Loop” on the OKNOTOK cassette, where Yorke can faintly be heard singing that song under the keyboards.

the song it ate

During the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions the band tried an electronic “True Love Waits”, gave up on it, and kept part of its backing track. That became this. Yorke later told the Elektron forum it was him messing about with Pro Tools for the first time.

The voice is spoken, not sung. Yorke explained the trick to Simon Reynolds of The Wire: give Auto-Tune a key, talk into it, and let it guess.

It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech.

thom yorke · the wire, july 2001

The words are an inventory of doors, from farm buildings to the rudders of ships, which ends on the kind that shut behind you for good. Jon Pareles in Rolling Stone linked it to the trapdoors in Kid A's “In Limbo” and read the band as falling through one themselves.

the grinding noise

The Guardian held this one against the album. Alexis Petridis, in a Guardian review that otherwise welcomed Amnesiac, counted “the grinding noise of Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” among its two lapses into self-indulgence. The note on the 2003 site's lyrics page, from Jam!, called it perhaps the strangest thing on either record: bass-heavy stop-start, lift pings and video-game effects, with a guess at Yorke's work with DJ Shadow and a warning that the title was not a typo.

the film, and the fire alarm

Johnny Hardstaff directed a computer-animated film that runs this track into “Like Spinning Plates”. It was made for Black Dog, the company behind Aphex Twin's “Windowlicker”, with graphics by the Glasgow studio Picture On The Wall, and took four months. It had its first showing on 29 November 2001 at the first Projectors Animation Festival at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, where killer whales swim in the dark under UV light, conjoined babies spin in a centrifuge and ribs of blue-patterned china push out of their chests. A fire alarm emptied the building partway through, and the screening resumed once the fire brigade had given the all-clear. MTV, Wikipedia records, would only broadcast it with a warning.

the song it came from

Kid A Mnesia in November 2021 finally let people hear the other half: “Pulk/Pull (True Love Waits Version)”, 2:46 of Yorke singing “True Love Waits” over this instrumental. Chris DeVille at Stereogum thought it maybe the best, and certainly the weirdest, thing on the disc of extras.

The band have never played it live; the archive holds no night for it.