Radiohead’s digital exhibit is more gripping than a physical exhibit could ever be

Although Radiohead’s pop music was meticulously constructed and built up in many layers, it was also ethereal and weightless, almost like thin air. The English band broke on the albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) with the structured rock songs of the nineties, and got off the ground with electronic dream sounds, contemporary classical and mysterious ambient.

Apparently Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke were very satisfied with their move to the free musical spaces: they never returned to the somewhat mainstream pop. Guitarist Greenwood would break into classical music: he wrote some memorable soundtracks. Vocalist Yorke produced groundbreaking electronic albums such as animation from 2019.

To celebrate the band’s artistic transition, the albums released twenty years ago are put in the spotlight. With a combined reissue of both records, including a disc with experimental remix work. More impressive is an audiovisual exhibition that Radiohead has devoted to its own work. And not in a museum environment, but as a Playstation game. The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition makes it possible to float through Radiohead’s work without a foothold, past fragments of sound and above all a lot of alienating image of the regular Radiohead illustrator Stanley Donwood.

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, who met at art school and had been inseparable since the first day of class, decided about three years ago that Donwood’s colossal archives of footage should one day be opened. The illustrator, together with Yorke, devised the visual language for the band. He came up with the scary demons and vulnerable children’s dolls, which always enhanced the desolate and fearful atmosphere in Radiohead’s music on album covers and in promotional material. And he drew thousands of posters and apocalyptic scenes, like film images accompanying the music.

Work was to be shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and then go on tour. But the pandemic thought otherwise. The ambitious project, for which thousands of music fragments and drawings were selected, came to a halt due to covid-19. But Yorke and Donwood got the enlightened idea of ​​​​setting up a digital exhibition, which everyone could walk through even from the strictest home insulation.

The two spent two long corona years on the game, which is more gripping than a physical exhibition could ever become. As a visitor, the ground is swept away from under your feet. The player starts out as a lost character in a forest of drawn, black and white trees. With the controller you move as ‘first person’, so only as a look ahead, towards a faint red light between the branches. It turns out to be a door to the Radiohead world. If you walk down a long hallway, you’ll hear the familiar intro on the song’s Prophet-5 synthesizer Everything in Its Right Place. You walk past a typical exhibition sign: ‘This is not a game. Take your time. You are at the beginning. So there must be an end.’

The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is indeed not a game. There are no assignments, you don’t have to solve puzzles. But you will be overwhelmed by the vastness of an open world, which is initially situated in a colossal, old industrial building. You float past damp concrete walls, with hundreds of drawings and sketches, which you can zoom in for a closer look.

Gradually, the environment becomes more incomprehensible. In a huge room with countless old TVs, each showing a different picture, stands a gigantic column. While listening to the screeching electronic sounds and distorted bass of the song The National Anthem hear, you are slowly drawn into the obelisk. And there suddenly the chopping drum and bass beats of this track spin around you, while you no longer know which is front or back. The movement through this bizarre room creates a unique remix.

In some ‘halls’ your breath catches in your throat. In a space with no floor or ceiling you float in a sinister matrix, while you are surrounded by lisping voices that were apparently all incorporated into Radiohead’s music. Or you enter a room full of crackling paper, and thousands of drawings that slowly let go and start to swirl around you like a hurricane. Then you walk into the interior of a monolith, only to come face to face with a demonic monster that stares at you until you can’t take it anymore and want to run away.

This makes this exhibition an amazing trip through the work of a band that is much more than a band. Radiohead has found the perfect platform to deepen and unlock riddles, because as a Playstation gamer you are freed from physical limitations and can shoot through the Radiohead universe like a comet. This mind-expanding, almost metaphysical exhibition concept deserves to be followed.