The brilliant Thom Yorke has had a busy 18 months. But when is he not busy? Fresh from composing the soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s excellent reimagining of Suspiria last year, he flew into 2019, finishing off and releasing his third stunning solo album away from Radiohead and Atoms for Peace’s own stellar catalog. Anima was released digitally at the end of June alongside a superb Netflix film by Paul Thomas Anderson, with a physical release coming July 19. We caught up as he was putting the finishing touches to it earlier this year, and talked Elektron inspiration, new Radiohead albums, nuclear energy, and breaking Tomb Raider. There was also a request for Elektronauts users…

You were one of the first bands to seamlessly use both synths and rock instrumentation. How come you decided to take that path, back in the days of Kid A?

Funny that you say that. It makes me think of the fact that we always used to work on tape, up until we really couldn’t anymore. Then we did the last record off of multitrack tape. Back to putting time code on a tape, you know? Literally days on end, just listening to (makes screeching noise) time code. That battle between the two worlds.
To answer your question though, I personally never understood the difference, and why we couldn’t! I like playing guitar, I’m not the world’s greatest guitar player and sometimes it doesn’t inspire me and then I like playing the piano more. Learning a new piece of equipment inspires me in just the same way.
I was finding it difficult at that time to be inspired by guitar music. It wasn’t really giving me anything. At that point, it was the only signature of authenticity, you know, and I’ve never seen it like that. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I’ve never seen the division, the way other people saw it.
What was hard was realizing very quickly, when you use machinery, that it’s not really a collaborative thing. We had to develop ways of going off into corners and build things on whatever sequencer, synthesizer or piece of machinery we would bring to the equation and then integrate that into the way we would normally work. That was really hard, to keep everybody on board.
There was a lot of scratching around in the early days, not knowing when to start, and not knowing what we didn’t want to do, what didn’t work.
In fact, Nigel (Godrich - long time Yorke and Radiohead producer extraordinaire and fellow Atoms for Peace member) has been going through all the tapes, and he says it’s kind of fascinating because, in the early tapes, it’s just chaos! Then it starts forming into this thing that you get the sense that we didn’t really care.
Each song would go in a completely different direction, and we felt totally at liberty to do that. I guess I’m talking about the Kid A and Amnesiac period: the one thing that I was absolutely certain about was that we had complete license to use whatever we wanted. Theremin, orchestra, drum machine or the wonderful Prophet.
When we were doing OK Computer, we did it all on tape, but we would occasionally use early Pro Tools to editing that we then would put back on tape. I was watching Nigel use Pro Tools, and I said: you need to teach me this! I was struck by how simple it was and how quickly I could learn that, and that was a major evolution for me.
Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors on Amnesiac was me f***ing around with Pro Tools for the first time!

You can sort of tell, listening to the songs produced around the turn of the millennium, the introduction of the sampler, the introduction of the Ondes Martenot and stuff like that. It’s like you say: why make a difference? Why choose one or the other?

To me, the whole point to the way we always wanted to work was that it was a collaborative exercise. Everybody should feel a little bit out of their depth, you know?
What was nice was to see people go off and figure out different paths in the middle of it. It was nice to watch Ed (Ed O’Brien) go into this world building loops and stuff and going off to buy loads of crazy pedals.
It was nice to watch Colin (Greenwood) teaching himself sampling and drum machines, and it was really nice to watch Jonny (Greenwood) go buy every single Analogue Systems module and teaching himself MAX.

It really comes to completion, that unique Radiohead sound that blends rock and electronics seamlessly, on your last album A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s just music, it blends so perfectly, and I could never dissect it and my brain doesn’t want to do that.

Thank you! The only agenda we had was to relax into it, which might sound a little stupid. I really was enjoying watching Jonny bringing lots of orchestra into it as well, that was just super fun, and we went back to using tape as well because we needed some sort of restriction that would force us to make decisions quickly.

Hey, this year you’re inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame! Did you expect that to happen when you started out, roughly 30 years ago?

I think we’ve always had an odd relationship to awards ceremonies. Because we were a British band during the era of the Brit awards when the KLF came on stage with machineguns and sheep, you know (laughs)? We have a twisted view of awards ceremonies.
Did I expect it to happen? No, because I didn’t think we were; this is not me being snobby, but I did not think we were a rock band in that way. I love The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and when they got it I thought yeah, fair enough!
It’s nice. They reported that I didn’t want to go, but I actually can’t go because I have written commissioned piano pieces that are being performed in Paris.

If you’d been asked the question back in the Nineties, though? In one of the first interviews you did, for The Oxford Curfew, the reporter seemed to be in awe of your focus and determination!

Yeah, I was those things (laughs)! I was nothing else, I was just that.

It’s a great, honor, naturally. Well deserved, and you’re in good company as well.

Yes indeed. I had to confess ignorance of the whole thing. I understand that it’s very culturally important. Our problem, really, is we have the Brits which is the f***ing opposite (laughs)!

You’ve been using Elektron stuff for quite some time now, right?

I have, yeah.

What was your intro to the gear?

Nigel had bought the Monomachine, the keyboard version, and I started messing with it and thought: oooh! Then I bought one of my own. It’s still kind of a mystery to me now, I must say!
The first thing I did with it was just some polyphonic thing because I thought that’s what it did best, the way that it spread polyphony out.
It was wildly unpredictable, and it just fascinated me, the architecture of it and everything. I was kind of hooked after that. I bought the Machinedrum a month later. That was it. I was off. Then I got the Sidstation.

You’ve got the Sidstation as well?

Yes. That’s great (laughs), so fun! I’m fascinated by the fact that it’s got all that background noise in it.

Yeah, it never shuts up, does it?

Never shuts the f*** up (laughs)!

I actually sort of rediscovered it, playing around with it yesterday. I used just the noise on all three voices. It’s surprisingly easy to get that noise sounding really organic and natural.

It’s like a wild animal. You plug it in and it just sounds bigger than anything else, well (except) maybe the Prophet, in different ways. It sounds enormous, that’s the mystery to me.

To the point where it’s impossible to join in with any other instrument (laughs)!

Yeah, it’s its own thing, absolutely! You can filter it down, but you don’t want to do that.



What other Elektrons do you have?

My full list: the Monomachine, the Machinedrum, the Octatrack – I love the Octatrack – the Sidstation, the Analog Keys. There’s another, where is it? I know, the drum machine, it was on tour, the analog drum machine (Analog Rytm). That’s in my flight case; I’ll open it a little bit later.

Did you try the Digitakt as well?

Yes, I’ve got that. That’s coming this afternoon. It’s also been in my flight case, coming back with all the gear. It sounds big, and it’s really quick to use. It’s fun, that’s what I like about it.

It’s the most accessible piece of kit, isn’t it?

I like throwing samples in there and cutting them up.

Do you think there’s a point where a piece of kit may lose its appeal, or magic, because it’s too accessible?

No (laughs)! I mean, because the whole point of Digitakt is, throw in your own samples. I don’t understand what’s wrong with that. I mean, yes, I miss my S3000, I need to get it working again, because it sounded brilliant, but you know it was painfully slow to use. You always thought: I’m sure there’s something else I should be doing!

When stuff takes a long time to fidget with though, your brain keeps working passively on what you’re really trying to create.

Yes, you do. You do, and the decisions you make are more significant, what you choose to cut up, because of how long it takes. Generally, that’s the case, which is why we went back to using tape on our last record.
The speed of access is now a problem over everything. You know, quick decisions, throw away, modify, constant automation on your DAW. That stuff is all well and good, but the reason people are going back to previous stuff is that everyone is looking for forms of restriction, I think.
I’m just looking at this cool polyphonic ensemble thing (Korg) that I used on a horror soundtrack. I got it on e-bay, and it immediately broke.

Oh no!

No, it was great (laughs)! It broke in a cool way. As I was laying down these cool sounds on one track it was losing control of itself, and that became like a signature for the whole soundtrack! You don’t get unexpected things like that on soft synths.

That unexpected drift or leak, yeah. Awesome. Going back to stuff that’s not so quick and direct is also a way to de-fragment your mind in a way, because your digital communication with the world is getting quicker and more fragmented all the time.

It’s not about the gear. It’s about what you’re looking for. Going back to the S-3000 thing and struggling with the Monomachine when you first buy it or whatever, there’s a mystery to it. Mystery is an important element.
I often think, when I buy a new piece of gear, you have this honeymoon period, where you don’t know what’s going on. I don’t ever read the manuals either, so I have no choice. Like when I bought this Make Noise-stuff, it was like, wow, this reverb is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard in my life! I was putting it on everything! Then, at some point, you wake up and realize, oh that’s really embarrassing, I’ve put it on everything! Then you realize what it is, how it works, it’s just a reverb, but it’s not just a reverb because it reverses/modulates/feeds back in on itself, you know?
Same with the Monomachine. Same with the Octatrack, but that really is a mystery (laughs)! You throw something in, and you’re fighting with it, you’re fighting, and then at some point you’re like: oh my God! That’s crazy. What is that? You’re putting a sample in, and you’re giving it something that’s got nothing to do with that sample, creating something brand new out of it. That’s the core of it. That weird fight between, you know, something to do with the interface of an Elektron machine and the way the guy using it has to find their way through that.
Some of the bits they probably won’t like, other bits they’ll really like, and there’s a fight between the two, or collaboration, depending on how you look at it. That’s weird.
You don’t really get that in any other creative medium. I mean, cameramen bitch and obsess about lenses in cameras, but they’re not necessarily dictating a work path you need to go down in order to go down here or go down there and you’ve got what you’ve got when you go down here -!
It’s really interesting watching Jonny learning MAX, and he, like most MAX programmers, takes pieces of other people’s programming.
I hear a voice in the background screaming: I don’t just do that (laughs)!
You know, you cobble it together and you take designs that people have done, little structures, new ideas adapted and reconstructed from other ideas, little architectures that other people have built, and then you build your own thing with. No other art form/creative platform does that.
I used a lot of Monomachine on the Atoms for Peace record (AMOK), and the Octatrack on something that I’m finishing now, even though I started a while ago. Sidstation I’ve never really managed to use on anything (laughs)! The drum machine (Analog Rytm) I use it a lot live because it’s so quick and it sounds really huge. The one I need to fall back on is the Monomachine, I think. It always sounds exciting, no matter what it’s doing.
I’ve used the Machinedrum quite a lot on remixes, when I went through this phase of doing remixes with people like Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), and performing them live. That was my go-to machine, that’s what started my remix phase. With my 808. Because, again, it’s dead simple, it’s tight as f***, the feel of it is really good so you can hang everything off it, you know?
I’m using the Analog Keys on a record I’m finishing right now. It sounds beautiful, I mean, for me it’s a bit tricky to use live, but Nigel, especially, loves the sound of it. He always tells me: go back to that one! (laughs)!

Is there a Radiohead album in the works?

No. We’re all doing separate things right now.

Atoms for Peace: what a great band, what a great name. Looking into the Eisenhower speech that started the historical Atoms for Peace, it’s almost like the peaceful use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons were meant to co-exist from the outset!

Yeah, in a way. The early days of it was entirely to build weapons, wasn’t it? Then they tried to say: hey look, there are all these wonderful benefits!

Your dad was a nuclear physicist, right?

He was, yes. Bless him.

Are you pro peaceful use of nuclear power?

No. I’ve had many arguments with my environmentalist friends. I don’t know where they stand on the issue now, but it used to be: we need to use nuclear power because we need to get off using fossil fuel now. But it seems like every time they try to make a new proposal for nuclear power stations, it’s not possible for various reasons.
They can’t get rid of waste safely, they can’t make it work financially, they can’t secure it properly, you know, look what happened in Japan! So, I don’t believe in it.
The problem with it is: ten years ago, we should have started making decisions about the way that we structure our use of power, in terms of the grid. In this country (UK), we rely on an old concept of the grid, where 50% of the power is lost in transfer.
There are all these solutions about localized power usage, which the government completely refuse to explore, because we have this grid system. When you make the decision to use nuclear power in the mix, you dictate this structure in a way that will work from then on, and you restrict the potential for renewables. That’s essentially my problem with it.

What’s your favorite Lindsay Anderson film? The filmmaker who did the epic trilogy starring Malcolm McDowell: If… O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, seen any of those?

If… I haven’t seen that in a long time!
It was like an eerie premonition of school shootings.
Yes, I remember that one. I watched it at school!

That’s a really weird thing for a school to show!

It was a weird school (laughs)! We also watched Apocalypse Now, when I was thirteen. That had a big effect on me.

Who’s your favorite artist right now?

I’m really into Alice Coltrane at the moment, all Alice Coltrane stuff. On the other extreme, I’m listening to quite a lot of (1950s/1960s) musique concrète, Pierre Henry and Bernard Parmegiani. They were tape editing. Well, sampling really. The first concepts of sampling were with these guys to me, and they would montage all sorts of s**t (laughs)! I was listening to something yesterday that Pierre Henry did with creaking doors. Fairly unlistenable, but it’s fascinating!
Then there are other collaboration things he did which is an absolutely beautiful montage. He was speeding up, slowing down, backwards, forwards, you know. My favorite piece is by Parmegiani, the one where he just blows on the saxophone at the start of the piece, and at the end of the piece, it’s just a cacophony of hundreds of them, into reverbs. It’s all done on tape! I don’t think Pierre Henry was even a musician, was he just an engineer?
This all happened to me because of the horror film (Suspiria, 2018). The director, Luca Guadagnino, from what he and I were looking for, kind of pushed me into listening and studying this period in music. Stuff I knew about, but I actually now take pleasure in listening to it!
Then, there’s this guy Ben Vida, who is just very minimalist and quite disruptive. Kind of like sculptures in music. Using simple tones, no air around them. You know, nothing, just like (makes tone generator vocal sounds).

How about your favorite astronomer or philosopher?

I guess I would say the only thing that I read is Buddhism books. This guy Suzuki. He’s really popular in that world. That sort of route of Zen Buddhism and meditation. I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly good student of it, but I read it!

Knowing that this is a completely irrelevant question: your favorite video game of all time?

I gave up video games when I started buying Elektron gear (laughs)!
No, I was always s**t at video games, but I liked Tank Command - it was one of the first vector (kind of) 3D games – only because it was really pretty!

Did you own a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 back in the day?

I was a Spectrum guy, with my brother (Andy). He was always the programmer, not me.
In the band, Jonny was the programmer. He learned machine code, the same as my brother did. That was a step too far for me. I was pulling TVs apart in my bedroom instead and putting magnets on them, Nam June Paik style!
Nigel was a Commodore 64 and a BBC guy. He still has his; he’s a bit of a collector.

What was your favorite Speccy game?

Oh, I don’t know. I used to be fascinated by these stupid adventure games. You are in a room. You pick up the gold goblet. Then this really s**tty animation starts. I thought it was interesting to program different stories and draw maps of them, but I got bored pretty quick!
Actually, much later on, I did get a bit obsessed with one of the early Playstation games. Me and Stan (Stanley Donwood) did the artwork when we were mixing OK Computer, and we found a Playstation in the studio when we were really high one night. This was one of those 3D games, one of the most famous early Playstation games, the one with Lara Croft?

Oh yeah, Tomb Raider!

We spent the entire evening not playing the game, we spent the entire evening making it do that thing when you walk through a wall, the wall disappeared and then you would just see a bunch of triangles, the 3D modeling. Every corner. F***, that’s really pretty man! For hours and hours and hours and hours (laughs)!



On the OK Computer album, there’s one song with speech synthesis used to a really good effect (Fitter Happier). Did you use the Speak&Spell?

That was a BBC. No, wait, we were using BBC as well, but that was just a really early Mac! Stan, who I did the artwork with, was experimenting with writing poetry at the time using the Mac voices. We collaborate with our writing quite a lot.
So he took - Jesus Christ, what was it called? This was quite a while ago! Whatever the one is that talks on OK Computer (editor’s note: possibly the Mac OS system voice called Fred) ! We spent a lot of time to get the inflection right, you know, because you have to put spaces in and re-spell things and stuff like that.
We didn’t expect it to get on the record!

It sounds like the late, great Stephen Hawking.

I think it’s the same core of the speech synthesis program.
You know what I’m really obsessed about?
The people who read this are tech heads, so maybe they’d know. I’ve been trying for ages to find this.
The first ever vocoder, by Bell Labs. Pre-war technology (1930s, called voder at the time). They had to teach these women to actually play them. They were in no way computerized. So they figured out a way of getting the phonics and all the breathing and stuff by using pedals and keys, and these women, like secretaries, learned how to operate it.
It is the most beautiful sounding artificial voice you’ll ever hear in your life! So smooth. I want to try to figure out this way of replicating or modeling how they did that, you know? A really good voice synthesizer.
Me and Jonny were obsessed with trying to build one using MAX, but we could not find one that’s, I don’t mean convincing, I mean using these original, very simple concepts for voice synthesizing.
You know what? Actually, one of my favorite things I’ve ever done using the Monomachine is with the voice synth!

Really?

On the soundtrack to Suspiria, when I went and met with the director Luca, he was talking about this giant, inhuman breathing that he wanted. I said: will you let me have a go with that? Because I’ve got an idea!
The idea was the Monomachine voice synth. I went back, and it just happened immediately. One of the few times when I just cued it up and it was breathing. Just a bunch of LFOs, and it started doing this thing! It was really interesting, and so simple.
I sent him a 15-minute track of that thing breathing, which I loved and he thought was completely insane (laughs).
There’s a tiny bit of it on the record. What a genius thing to put in a little machine like that!

A perfect musical moment in your life, so far?

My favorite one recently has been when I was taken, kicking and screaming (because it was not what I wanted to do), to the Venice Film Festival when they premiered the horror film. Actually, it was kind of fun. I was surprised. Mostly thanks to my girlfriend Dajana, who told me: come on, you might enjoy yourself!
Watching the movie, there’s this one section called Volk, the main dance piece, and they’d written the dance prior to the audio development, and I’d written the music to the dance afterwards, which is really a strange thing to do, and I really struggled with it.
I had this idea all the way down the line of making a relatively simple melody but then spreading it around the cinema, using the surround sound in a particular way that would make you feel like the walls were collapsing. I just had this idea, and I could hear this thing in my head. I struggled for six months to get it out, you know what I mean?
I had three or four completely aborted attempts, and then I hit upon what I needed. I sat with the sound engineer, and we finally spread it out and started dividing it up into different arrays, in slightly different times and in and out.
To actually finally sit in the cinema during that section of the film was one of those satisfying moments where somewhere you hope you can get to one day - you hear it in your head - actually happens, and it’s better than you thought! The room really did feel like it was collapsing! They were using this Dolby system where there’s speakers in the roof, and the broken synthesizer I was talking about before suddenly arises in the ceiling of the cinema and made you go: what the f*** (laughs)?
You know, the whole point is you’re trying to make people feel uneasy. It starts as a piece in a relatively simple manner, and it starts spreading around in the room in a way that makes your head hurt.
That was one of the really musical moments of my life. I actually did what I imagined. Wow!

I need to see that in a real movie theater, now.

You must see it in a cinema. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense.

Please share your favorite joke!

I’m terrible at jokes. My son went through a phase reading joke books at the table but I don’t think I could ever remember them… Hold on: what do you call a fish with three eyes?

Don’t know!

A fiiish! (eye = i…)