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After reaching its creative peak in the ’90s with the premillennial anxiety of OK Computerrock music suddenly felt passé.
Seeking musical guidance anywhere there wasn’t a guitar, the leader Thom Yorke immersed himself in Warp Records’ catalog of electronica, avant-garde jazz, 20th century classical music, and the pioneering computer music of American professor Paul Lansky.
After recording their long-awaited next album for 18 months with producer Nigel Godrich, theThe Kid A sessions provided enough material for the band to briefly toy with the idea of a double album.
Skipping the conventional marketing campaign for Kid A, their follow-up single ‘No Surprises’ fue 2001’s transcendental cosmic gem ‘Pyramid Song’.
One of the most majestic songs of all his production. ANDAmnesiac’s lead single offered a poignant, intoxicating exploration of mortality and the afterlife with a bold arrangement of haunting strings, jazzy drum fills, and a spectral layer of electronic effects that elevate the listener to a sincerely otherworldly realm..
As is Radiohead tradition, ‘Pyramid Song’ had been floating around in their sets for a while, debuting live at the 1999 Amsterdam Tibetan Freedom Concert.
And Yorke reflected:
“The chords I play have a lot of quarter notes. You think you’re so clever playing them, but they’re so simple,” Yorke told Mojo in 2001. “For ‘Everything In Its Right Place,’ I programmed my piano to play on a laptop, but ‘Pyramid Song’ sounded better without it. treatment. ‘Pyramid Song’ is my total obsession with a Charlie Mingus song called ‘Freedom’ and I was trying to duplicate it, actually.”
In 1999, during a two-week break, visited an Egyptian exhibition in Copenhagen, studying customs funeral homes and funeral rituals triggered a strange marriage with one of the most famous contemporary scientists. “It’s something I never thought I could convey in a song and in lyrics, but I did it, and it was very, very difficult,”
He added:
“Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force. It is a fourth dimension and from the idea that time is completely cyclical; He’s always doing this (twists his finger). It’s a factor, like gravity. It’s something I also found in Buddhism. “That’s what ‘Pyramid Song’ is about, the fact that everything goes in circles.”
