Jonny Greenwood

UK 2018 Reissue, Remastered. Film director Simon Pummell's movie Bodysong collages footage taken from a century of cinema and home movies to present the story of a life from birth to death; a life that is unique but is never extricated from communal human experience or a collective shared memory. Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's guitarist (though a reluctant axe plucker of late--this album finds him in his other role, that of sonic landscape boffin as showcased on Kid A and Amnesiac) provides the soundtrack, the contents of which merge the fields of chamber music (with the Emperor String Quartet), electronica, post-rock, avant-garde, modern jazz and whatever takes his fancy into vignettes which are unpredictable, chaotic, joyous, desperately harrowing and utterly at the mercy of circumstance, much like life itself. While the works of Talk Talk ("Laughing Stock"), Godspeed You Black Emperor and the spirit of Pink Floyd's celestial psychedelia are subconscious touchstones, Bodysong couldn't be anything other than an archly experimental record made by a member of Radiohead, the world's most pre-eminent member of the boffin-rock awkward-squad. From "Splitter" (manic metropolitan jazz with shrieking trumpets and skidding double-bass lines) to "Peartree" (gloomy church organ) and "Clockwork Tin Soldiers" (icy xylophones, contorted synths, cuckoo clocks and Kraftwerk), this is music that will doubtlessly be enhanced when experienced in tandem with the film's images and yet deserves to be appreciated in moody isolation.