Weird Fission Thom Yorke detonates Atoms for PeA ce By marty sartini Garner Photos by michael muller Art by stanley Donwood / slowlydownward.com Thom Yorke is in Chicago. In a way. He and visual artist Stanley Donwood are sitting on a couch in a study somewhere in England, with rows of CDs and a framed copy of The White Stripes’ De Stijl hanging above their heads. The pubs will be opening soon. In Chicago, Yorke and Donwood appear in only two dimensions. A scrim of distortion falls over their faces now and then, and the window through which we speak to one another shifts arbitrarily between aspect ratios as it adjusts to minuscule variations in our broadband speed. They’re here, in England and on my screen in Chicago, to talk about Amok, the debut release from Yorke’s project Atoms for Peace. Yorke’s pedigree has been exalted to that rarified air that tends to choke the life out of things and render them rote, but it still bears repeating: He is the singer and a founding member of Radiohead, and thus the public face of what is arguably the most important (and certainly the most referenced) pop-rock group of the past two decades. Donwood is his advance man, the sole artist responsible for forging the striking visual aesthetic Radiohead has projected since their 1995 album The Bends. Donwood is also a constant presence in the studio, and his lack of musical acumen (“I find it difficult to distinguish a bass from a drum,” he says) makes him a valuable resource, a kind of moderator or transliterator who’s often able to put into words what Yorke can only put into music. What Yorke and his collaborators put into Amok is relentless, and driving, and weighted with the kind of heaviness that needs the cushion of a robust rhythm section. Bass supercomputer Flea, all-star drummer Joey Waronker and poly-limbed percussionist Mauro Refosco hammered out the album’s pulsing core, which Yorke and longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich then spangled and tamed with crinkled guitar and synthetic dust. It’s unlike anything Yorke has done before. He sits back on the couch with his arms crossed in front of his chest, at ease. His beard turns from brown at the cheeks to grey at the jaw in a subtle gradient, which somehow sharpens his features to a point somewhere around his nose. “I’m just getting used to the fact that you have to look at someone looking down at the corner of where you’re looking when you’re Skyping, rather than trying to look there,” Donwood says, pointing at the screen on the table in England. Yorke grins and sits up, then leans in with one ringed finger coming toward the camera. His fingertip covers it, and my screen goes black. FILTER . 53 Yorke put Atoms for Peace together in 2009 to help him separate the numerous strands that made up his 2006 solo LP The Eraser. “I’d run into John Frusciante and Flea a few times backstage at Chili Peppers gigs, and there was one time when they were going on about The Eraser, and how they were really into it,” Yorke explains. “And that got me thinking.” Yorke had been friends with Waronker for years, and had been looking for an excuse to work on a new project with him. “I sent the email around and said, ‘If they get back to me soon, then I’ll do it. Otherwise, it’s a stupid idea, forget it.’ Flea and Joey got back to me within an hour. So it was on.” The Eraser was assembled from years’ worth of sound clips Yorke gathered while touring and rehearsing with Radiohead. He and Godrich processed the clips beyond recognition and slotted them into space via laptop. It’s a claustrophobic album, and it seems vulgar to listen to it through anything but headphones. The rhythms that Flea, Waronker and Refosco were recruited to recreate were made not only from percussive found sounds and the laptop’s moist drum loops, but from the snips of Yorke and Godrich’s fresh cuts. The mechanical edit itself becomes a dot of rhythm. Even the clearly struck piano chords that open the album—and go on to function as the closest thing The Eraser has to a launchpad—are clipped before they finish ringing. The assemblage of sound is pulled toward that center, but pulled in the manner of thousands of resilient granules of metal filings towards a particularly weak magnet. The group’s first attempts to force those stipples of sound out of live instruments was arduous. “When we were doing the bassline for the song ‘Atoms for Peace,’ the timing on it is actually really fucking weird,” Yorke says. “If you sit down and put any analysis into it at all, it’s really peculiar. It took Flea quite a while to get that. Things like that, I really love—you watch such amazing musicians that you really respect pushing themselves.” 54 . FILTER The Eraser tour, for which the group was billed as “Thom Yorke????” or simply “??????,” kickstarted something in Yorke. “For me, the whole thing was born out of the excitement of going on this tour. It was only a couple of weeks but, by the end of it, it seemed to open a bit of a door.” The band is “driven from a different place” from Radiohead, he says, where the democratic mandate often slows artistic progress. Atoms for Peace’s open-ended administration—Yorke says it “browns me off something chronic” when people call them a supergroup—is founded on different principles. When the group reconvened in LA in 2010 for three days of recording, Yorke stuck by their founding document. “We were just going on the merits of what we found exciting,” he says. “I’m throwing them things out of the computers and stuff and asking them to imitate them and seeing where it goes.” Despite his reputation, Yorke’s particular genius doesn’t rest in his intellectual capabilities, but in the ways he is able to challenge his prodigiously talented friends. It’s fascinating to watch him interact with Donwood. The artist is patient and still, and chooses his words carefully. Yorke laughs, rocks back and forth and spills backwards onto the couch when something tickles him. Donwood tells me about his own temptation to draw using computer-generated vectors whose perfection is guaranteed by their motherboard. He appreciates the precision, but the vectors lack the inevitable errors of humanity that give his work its particular character. Yorke asks whether Donwood ever had to learn how to draw a straight line in school. Then Yorke mentions, casually, that he’d learned in his A-levels (roughly the British equivalent of AP-level courses) that there is no such thing as a straight line. “What?” Donwood says, incredulous. “Eventually it would be a circle,” Yorke says. “Because any straight line will have errors in it that keep it from being perfectly straight?” I ask. “You could mathematically argue that no straight line is straight, that it would eventually curve and become a circle,” Yorke says. Yorke’s A-level lesson was likely on non-Euclidean geometry, which argues that any straight line, whether drawn by hand or by a computer, is in fact the arcing segment of a circle. The argument challenges the Euclidean understanding of straight lines, which rely on an ideal condition—that is, perfectly flat, two-dimensional planes. But since our “It was actually just an excuse to build great big fucking bombs,” Yorke says. He’s right, world and space are three-dimensional and spherical, the thinking goes, Euclid’s flat lines but you can’t help noticing Eisenhower’s conflicted tone in the text. “I feel impelled to bend when forced into the real world. speak today in a language that in a sense is new,” the president says of atomic weaponry. When Yorke says that he was merely tossing sketches of songs at the group during “One which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would their LA sessions, he’s not being flip; he couldn’t even count off the rhythm. “Mauro have preferred never to use.” He reads like a reluctant messenger, apologizing for the and Joey would say, ‘What about this bit here, what’s the measure?’ I mean, honestly, I great horror that had been let loose in the world while simultaneously defending the was hearing the fucking ‘one’ in a different place,” he laughs. Godrich would trace the US’s right to nuclear development in the name of self-defense. It’s a cluster of emotions threads of rhythm back to the spool and count off for the players. “I was sort of going, that would show up again years later, when, in his last speech as president, the general ‘That feels good!’ ‘That doesn’t feel good!’ That was the extent of my involvement,” would warn us of the military–industrial complex. “If the people of the world are Yorke says. Godrich culled the hours of tape in real time by noting every moment to conduct an intelligent search for peace,” he says in the “Atoms for Peace” speech, Yorke declared something good. “It was a good thing I wasn’t in charge of finding all “they must be armed with the significant facts of today’s existence.” It might have been of the parts,” he jokes. “I would have literally listened to everything from scratch.” propaganda, but, at least on this front, he had a point.