Black Swan Songs

As tempting as it is to purchase the vinyl 12″ remix singles that Radiohead has been releasing this summer, BlackSwanSongs is going to wait until October 10 when we’ll be able to stream all of them on Spotify. (The collected remixes will be released as TKOL RMX 1234567 on October 10 in the UK and on October 11 in North America.)

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Some nice person was generous enough to post their high definition video of Thom Yorke’s new (and still unnamed) band during their live debut Saturday night at the Echoplex in Los Angeles.

The band definitely qualifies as a supergroup: Yorke in front on vocals, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck/R.E.M. drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco, and Flea on bass.

Check this video out! And don’t forget to blow it up to full screen. Or better still, cable it to your 1080 p television and check it out super large. The sound is decent and the HD digital video maintains so much quality that the bigger it gets, the more you feel like you are actually at the show…a strange effect of the HD video combined with the location in the room where the videographer is standing.

The five gentlemen from Oxfordshire, England have done it to me again. While In Rainbows continues to climb my all-time favorite albums ladder, I heard “House of Cards” this evening and tapped into the subtext of the lyrics at exactly the prefect time. I felt like Mr. Thom Yorke had penned the lyrics exactly for me. I researched the video and was reminded that in lieu of traditional cameras, the video’s director “shot” with lidar technology which detects the proximity of objects from a sensor and yields a grainy,  grid-like appearance.

Turns out the technology is not proprietary; the data used to make the video was released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available at Google Code.

While the story of the lyrics echoes a scene from the masterful Ang Lee film THE ICE STORM, I keyed into the initial couplet:

I don’t want to be your friend.
I just want to be your lover.

And then I got wrapped up in the next:

No matter how it ends.
No matter how it starts.

Luckily before I got too depressed thinking about lost love, I started thinking about M-theory string theory. I watched a documentary on the Science Channel that explained M-theory in layman’s terms. It worked out to be a much needed distraction for my brain’s solipsistic nature.

Once they broached the eleventh dimension and parallel universes, I was sufficiently safe from entering a manic episode.

Radiohead's artwork for "These Are My Twisted Words"

Well either Radiohead never had anything planned for Wall of Ice or they did have something planned and now they are just really pissed off that the shark got jumped a little early…cause the wallofice.com page is no longer linking to their W.A.S.T.E. store.

But, in chummy Radiohead fashion, they’ve released a new single for all to download – complete with cool artwork – for free.

mp3: radiohead :: these are my twisted words .zip