At one point, I remarked out loud that I’d be ready to leave the room as soon as I figured out how to hear the bass line. It’s all as art-school pretentious as you would expect, but the designers also know what you’re there for. The vocals can be triggered by approaching the receiver of a payphone in one side of the room-here, we paused to riff about calling our friend Thom, only to pick up and hear a snippet of his anguished, ring-modulated wailing on the other end (“I do so enjoy our chats, Thom”). You enter a room bathed floor-to-ceiling in the flashing lights of TV monitors, the song’s ghostly ambience isolated and echoing. One of my favorite sections centers on “The National Anthem,” which I played through with my partner sitting next to me on the couch. When you stand on scattered flyers of the band’s bear face logo in a simulated warehouse rave, the beat from “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” switches up on you as lines of matrix code fly by. Again, interactivity is limited-there’s not a single button prompt in the entire EXHIBITION-but you trigger different stems and transitions by walking through the installations. It’s soundtracked entirely by broken down audio from the albums, so you enter the hall to the intro from “Everything In Its Right Place” and things unfold dynamically depending on the path you take. More than a repackaging of the rerelease’s accompanying artbook, EXHIBITION is an acknowledgement that these songs are so vast and cryptic that you could get lost walking around inside them it presents a charmingly alive world populated by field trip groups of papier-mâché creatures and the stick figure janitors sweeping up after them. What we ended up with-a free-to-download virtual museum on PS5 and the Epic Games store-seems much more in line with the band’s visionary reputation (though it brings me great joy to imagine Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood donning monster costumes to realize this particular scene in meatspace). The story goes that pre-COVID, there were plans for a traveling, in-person installation to celebrate the expanded reissue of KID A and AMNESIAC. In chamber after chamber, EXHIBITION masterfully uses color, lighting, and impossible space to illustrate the music of Radiohead’s most iconic era. Presented this way, it’s viscerally unnerving. The music was always challenging by design. The sheer scale is dizzying, and the lack of control reminiscent of a certain type of horror game, the most iconic example being AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT (no relation, that I’m aware of to the titular KID). Your only means of input being the controller’s analog stick, you can either turn back or creep on towards the portal on the other side. As you climb into the structure at the center of the KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, synth accompaniment in tow, you see the glowing orange walls stretch away from you and the silhouette of a giant minotaur stalk the perimeter. The Pyramid Atrium is larger on the inside than on the outside.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |