Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

I was absolutely stunned when we learned how intertwined “In C” and “Everything In It’s Right Place” are. I am still stunned. I have told at least five people about it, and they’re all excited for me to show them the similarities. Radiohead was my undisputed favorite band from 7th grade until the end of high school. I have heard Everything In It’s Right Place at least a few hundred times, and I had already noticed a lot of the qualities that were discussed as similarities between the two compositions. Even still, I didn’t think of the Radiohead song during either of the two versions of In C that we listened to. After we listened to both of those recordings, the first second of the Radiohead song made the connections apparent. Not having had any listening background in minimalism, I was previously unable to draw the parallels. In systematically dissecting the pieces and putting them back together virtually superimposed, I almost totally lost it. I’ve known that Jonny Greenwood, the guy who plays lead guitar and does most of Radiohead’s orchestration, listens to a lot of contemporary music similar to what we’ve been covering in class. I was aware that his listening influenced his orchestration of string parts and such, but not of full song structure. Since Monday’s class, I’ve done a little research and a lot more listening to Kid A from a minimalist/drone perspective, and I’ve found so many parallels. Nearly every song that I’ve inspected so far (I’m about halfway through the album) can be broken down and related in a similar way to the two that we chose. I would love to maybe discuss in class some more connections between Kid A and the music that our class is most heavily based on. All in all I’m having trouble vocalizing how the connections are affecting me. It’s pretty outrageous.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 8:05 pm and is filed under , david, In C, Radiohead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.