Kid a mnesia exhibition icon4/6/2023 ![]() After October 2000, the band was never the same again. For the uninitiated, it also offers a perfect place to start. For the faithful, it’s a long-awaited valediction of the band’s most creative and far-reaching period. The retrospective box set Kid A Mnesiareleased last month reunites the two albums recorded during these sessions, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), along with a cassette of B-sides and a disc of alternates and outtakes. The result was anti-commercial music for a mass audience, perhaps the last of its kind, a gesture of precision-guided iconoclasm that caught fans and critics unawares with its effortless articulation of what many (then, as now) lacked the vocabulary to express: the profound and unrelenting anxiety of our tumultuous young century. Setting their anthemic, guitar-driven roots in large part aside, the band immersed itself in the abrasive tonalities and complex rhythms that spanned avant-gardes, from kosmische to free jazz, ambient to lately insurgent electronica. Instead, between January 1999 and April 2000, Radiohead stripped their sound to its foundations, and then shifted those foundations altogether. The band’s disillusionment is palpable in the intermittent efforts to follow up OK Computer: the tap of stadium-sized melancholy has turned off, the golden goose would prefer not to lay. He looks exhausted and fragile, wandering from terminal to television station, searching for a stage exit in vain. You can see it afflicting Thom Yorke like an allergy of the soul in Grant Gee’s Meeting People Is Easy (1998). Radiohead had sensed this shift in real time. The entertainment-industrial complex, newly engorged by the Telecom Act of 1996 and the ascendant deregulatory regime, had proven adept at absorbing its opposite, detourning the ‘alternative’ signifiers of the counter-culture into yet another brand in its megacultural portfolio. ![]() The grunge explosion of the early ‘90s had revealed itself as another round of corporate enclosure, its network of independent, semi-autonomous labels and scenes broken up and bought off, its disaffection processed and shipped, first as commodity, then as cliché. We can see now, of course, that what appeared to be another tectonic shift in the fabric of the mainstream-hardly ten years after Nevermind-was only a closing of the loop. How could an album like Kid A make its way to the top of the transatlantic charts, in this life or any other? From the vantage of 2021, it seems like a cosmic joke. In hindsight, the most transformative events only come to seem more unlikely. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION is out now for free on Epic Games Store.Metamorphosis distorts. Explore the KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION yourself. There are surprises at every turn that you should experience without a guide. At one point, I was abducted by three songs and left to float amidst crumbling artworks until the final chord. Art sits in frames, but it’s also scratched into walls, or brought to life as towering panoramas. I have a mental map of every note, every breath on Kid A and Amnesia, but I still got lost in the weird, Ballardian space of the exhibition’s halls. Throughout the exhibition, Radiohead’s music will rebuild itself around you. ![]() All around you, Everything In Its Right Place seems to endlessly remix itself. Up close, those walls are made of RGB pixels. Inside, welcoming you, is a corridor of flickering, smearing walls. You stumble through a sketched out forest towards a red door. That includes re-releases of Kid A and Amnesia, albums from over two decades ago, joined by Kid Amnesiae, “a memory palace of half-remembered, half-forgotten sessions & unreleased material.” It’s a collection of rooms, corridors, and spaces inspired by and filled with music and art from the recent KID A MNESIA release. The type who knows the lyrics to their songs before they’re officially released, but even I was surprised by the dark, playful exploration of the exhibition. ![]()
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