If you’re from a certain era, Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac were seismic events, altering the course of both alt rock and pop culture. This wasn't a given, as they were complex albums that marked an evolution of the band's musical and visual aesthetic which found them plunging deeper into their experimental side.
Coming at a time when anything seemed possible and that breadth of possibility meant an entire generation felt uneasily unmoored from history, the two albums became an unlikely repository of anthems of the time, and the fractured, haunting songs when revisited today take on an almost Cassandra-like quality: predicting the emotional tone of the century to come.
Which means that the arrival of the Radiohead Motion Picture House at this year’s Coachella was destined to make a splash from the start.
A massive installation that celebrates the Kid A/Amnesiac duo, the Radiohead Motion Picture House took the form of a bunker gallery complete with a four screen surround theater that plays an original film based on the copious amount of art the band was making at the time the albums were recording, itself based on a virtual museum made by design studio [namethemachine].
Matt Davis, Executive Producer of [namethemachine], shared his generous answers to our Now Playing questions, unpacking the development of the exhibition, which is currently playing in New York (through July 12) and set for a tour of Chicago (July 30 - Aug 23), Mexico City (Oct 27 - Nov 15), and San Francisco (Jan 14 - Feb 7).
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No Proscenium: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Matt Davis: This is really a hybrid kind of film / art exhibition that takes you through the creative journey of the Kid A / Amnesiac period of Radiohead. Obviously Radiohead is one of the greatest bands of all time and these are two of their most unbelievable albums. They were such a creative powerhouse in that early 2000s period. While they were making those records, they were painting and writing. Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood had literally thousands of sketches and paintings and poems and just so much output that eventually got collaged and coalesced into those two records. The experience combines galleries in a maze with a custom-built screening room that blends the architecture of the film with the surrounding space, showcasing KID A MNESIA The movie and a spatial audio soundtrack mixed from the original multi-tracks by Nigel Godrich.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
MD: When the 20th anniversary of Kid A was coming up, the band really wanted to do something with all of that stuff. It's not even cutting room floor stuff. It's just a tremendous amount of output from that era that had gone sight unseen. The story that's been out there for a minute is around that time, just pre-covid, there were plans to do an exhibition. COVID killed that. Then there was the idea of doing something as a virtual exhibition, which is how we ([namethemachine]) got involved. We built this Unreal Engine-based virtual museum that took all those artworks and the multitracks from the recordings and mashed it all up into this crazy weird kind of virtual museum-maze-dystopian-walkcape-thing. That was really cool. The inspiration then for for this incarnation of it came from finishing that game with everyone in the studio and Thom was “driving” around the game and, I think it was Stanley, who was like this is really fun to just watch you do this….we should do an official video or something like that and yada yada yada. We experimented with some of that stuff and did some tests around making a proper film out of this using the the game as the set, wrapping a bit of a narrative around it and doing the best possible version of this thing. It turned out really great. It was one of those things where you're like “oh, this feels like what it should have been all along…like this is the best possible version of this thing which exploded [an] exhibition out of this film that embodies the whole era of all that artwork. Really the inspiration is the record and all the original source material that came out of it. The question was: “how do you bring people into that world?” Bringing people into the headspace that they were in while making this stuff was the big idea.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
MD: I think it's pretty rare that you have such a well produced and intense piece of visual media so explicitly tied to the art pieces, the exhibition design, and a lot of the practical stuff going on in the space. It was all created from the same DNA. The actual works and pieces are present in different forms throughout the whole thing. The bigger a fan you are, the more you notice that, the more you kind of go into the Easter eggs of the whole thing. And I think for a casual kind of attendee, you're just sort of overwhelmed by, you know, the nature of it all.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
MD: It's a good question about the experience that was unexpected. I think you can design a theater or a space or a container for this and you can look at the scale in CAD or on a screen. But the decision to do the four video walls and have the immersive sound..we weren't quite sure how that would play. The surprise is just how enveloped by everything you felt. It was definitely a pleasant surprise and discovery. It’s one of those situations where you're not sure if it's going to work until you're in there and it definitely worked. The other surprise was the format. We toyed with “is this a full 360 film? Is it two 180s? Is it a dome?” There's a lot of different kinds of immersive film and wraparound media going on.
For something of this size, this number of attendees, we settled on having four screens wrapped around the audience with the same image on each screen and it being widescreen. When you're sitting in a lot of these things, unless you're in the sweet spot of a dome, if something is all around you, you look around everywhere for 10 seconds and then you just look right in front of you. We wanted this to be a proper feature length. So, when something's five minutes or it's a theme park ride, or it's an immersive short, yes, you could do the full immersive dome thing, and people are looking around for five minutes and it's cool, but if you really demand someone's attention, you don't want them to miss anything. So, really at the end of it, people stare straight ahead. We also wanted to feel communal. We have this in-the-round donut seating thing where you can look wherever you want. And we felt like with everyone looking up with the screens angled towards you, so you feel like you're really in the middle and kind of overwhelmed by this thing, it's a good. What was really a nice discovery was both how communal and how sort of intimate it felt with how expansive the space is. Another thing is how well the repeated image works and still feels enveloping without feeling repetitive. And finally, how good it actually sounds in there and how good these records really are. It's good.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
MD: I think it'll get you in the mood no matter what because I think the space draws you in. Whatever your predisposition is to get in the mood for such a thing.
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