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Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork
Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies.
The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago - but so much remains the same.
The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago - but so much remains the same.
364 pages, Hardcover
First published November 4, 2021
25 people are currently reading
449 people want to read
About the author
Thom Yorke
42 books145 followersThomas "Thom" Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician and singer-songwriter who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but has also played drums and bass guitar (notably during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions). In July 2006, he released his debut solo album, The Eraser.
Yorke has been cited among the most influential figures in the music industry; in 2002, Q Magazine named Yorke the 6th most powerful figure in music, and Radiohead were ranked #73 in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2005. Yorke has also been cited among the greatest singers in popular music; in 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Yorke voted the 18th greatest singer of all time, and in 2008, he was ranked 66th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" list.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Yorke
Yorke has been cited among the most influential figures in the music industry; in 2002, Q Magazine named Yorke the 6th most powerful figure in music, and Radiohead were ranked #73 in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2005. Yorke has also been cited among the greatest singers in popular music; in 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Yorke voted the 18th greatest singer of all time, and in 2008, he was ranked 66th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" list.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Yorke
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 22, 2023
The art is fantastic, if you're interested in the universe of Kid A and Amnesiac I seriously recommend this book and the game. Should be read with headphones on.
December 27, 2021
So beautifully haunting.
Going through the artwork while listening to the album is an incredible vibe.
Going through the artwork while listening to the album is an incredible vibe.
January 4, 2022
Knyga irgi skirta Radiohead fanams, bet tuo pačiu leidžia išnykti šios grupės pasaulyje neklausant jų muzikos, o žiūrint į jų albumų vizualus, ir būtent tai tą grupę ir jų kūrybą padaro dar įspūdingesnę ir įkvepiančią.
January 1, 2023
I’m counting this book as read even though it’s 90% artwork, I don’t care what anybody says. This was awesome, Radiohead is awesome, I am awesome
June 1, 2022
Ilustraciones chulas de un par de mis discos favoritos.
December 24, 2025
This is why Radiohead will remembered their experimental and they thom and Stanley drew pictures while making kid a and amnesiac. Great book. :)
July 4, 2022
“STANLEY DONWOOD: Twenty years seem to have passed like nothing, but it really is a long time. I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the War on Terror, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in”
“And the changes that have happened to society, culture and our understanding of history are also huge”
“THOM YORKE: At that time we had this dream of a workshop space: an open space for lots of ideas”
“We wanted to be completely independent in every aspect of the production element of everything we were doing. And at the same time everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this con-gratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at. So it was impossible to even start work, for a long time.
“Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of jingoistic triumphalism in popular culture”
“Thom Yorke: We felt that there was a sort of uncomfortable shift in awareness going on.”
“What we were listening to, what we were reading, was the total opposite of that. The phrase ‘spin with a grin’ was flying around at the time, because of the aggressive and self-serving PR tone coming out of the New Labour government.”
“It was a strange new phenomenon to behold, and one now taken for granted: an obsession with how one looks rather than what one does.”
“Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of disappointment about integrity, or lack thereof, pertaining to Tony Blair. We’d made all this artwork that depicted fires, nuclear explosions over America and the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center . . . and then 9/11 happened and you had to go and promote the record in America”
“Thom Yorke: But why were we so obsessed, for example, with drawing the trees and all that sort of stuff? Part of it was that I had made the decision to sort of spend a lot of time in Cornwall, and Stan and I were travelling around a lot together in the landscape . . .”
“Stanley Donwood: David Hockney in the Pompidou. Incredible”
“And that’s what kicked the whole thing off: let’s make these massive landscapes, these epic things”
“Stanley Donwood: I thought it would be really funny if we painted just in shades of blue and purple.”
“Thom Yorke: It coincided with the fact that I’d a had a complete creative block, and Rachel, my partner at the time, had said, ‘Stop trying to make music. Stop completely for a while.’ So I was wandering around just drawing anything I could see. Landscape. So landscape became an extremely important part of what was going on, because it loosened me up. When I did eventually start thinking about music and we started getting together again, landscape had freed me up, and I know Stan was into that stuff as well.”
“Stanley Donwood: Just creating a world in which you can tell a story. I felt like I was just full of stuff that I wanted to get out – all these ideas, all these interpretations of current affairs, politics, history. But it felt like you couldn’t do it in isolation: you had to build some sort of structure that it would make sense in, otherwise you’d just be a loony on a bus.”
“Thom Yorke: You can pick up either of our sketchbooks at the time and both the mono-logues are perpetually self-destructive. So the act of sitting down in front of a landscape and just trying to represent that in whatever way we felt – choosing to listen to that and not any of the shit in your head – was a massively freeing experience. I spent a lot of time alone, trying to get rid of this self-destructive noise in the head”
“So things will pop out and you’ll be like: ‘I’ve no idea how that arrived.’ That’s always the case to some extent. But this one was like a tortuous journey from almost total gridlock – complete lack of confidence, complete cynicism in our own success, not feeling in any way connected culturally with what was going on in our own country, but at the same time being aware that we were in a really privileged position.”
“Thom Yorke: At that point I was fucking hard to work with musically, because I had a very fixed idea in my mind of what something was, and I would not shut up until it happened, which was very hard for the rest of the guys. But when we finally made it to our own studio, I had this choice to walk away, and go and play with Stan instead. It gave the others space, but it also inspired me in a different way.”
“Stanley Donwood: It felt as if you heard the music in a different way when you were up in the mezzanine as well, because you’re a kind of observer then. You’re not in the making space.”
“Thom Yorke: Because it was the Radiohead studio, we were able to work on the artwork in the same way that the band were working on the music. We could just try loads of stuff”
“There was a moment where – as far as I was concerned – we totally forgot about the idea that we were even making a record”
“There was a point where everybody had to say to me, ‘All right, look . . . we need to move on to the next bit.’ But it was a long time before that happened – months and months.”
“Stanley Donwood: The music seemed to speak to me in a way that Radiohead’s previous music hadn’t done. It felt very now; it felt very important in some way. And so all I had to do was find a way of extracting what the music looked like from the music.”
“Stanley Donwood: It felt like – if a method was developing, that was a bad thing. If you’re doing things by a method you just end up with the same result in different iterations.”
“We were trying to destroy methods, to destroy habit. Basically, really perversely trying to make things as difficult as we could all the time.”
“Stanley Donwood: The two records to me, in my head, felt very different. Kid A was these increasingly urgent answerphone messages left on a phone that no one ever listened to, and Amnesiac – I had this idea that Amnesiac was songs that had been left in a drawer in an old dusty chest of drawers that had been left in an attic. So both of them were kind of . . . kind of crying out for attention, but had been forgotten”
“Thom Yorke: I don’t know why you started drawing minotaurs – I don’t know why that started.
Stanley Donwood: The labyrinth.”
“Thom Yorke: He was banging on about this all the time, the labyrinth thing.
“Stanley Donwood: I was obsessed with it . . .
“Thom Yorke: On and on and on he went. And it really formed part of what was happening. The minotaur cursed to repeat its mistakes in a maze.”
“Stanley Donwood: I was a real evangelist for the internet in the beginning; I thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to be like Gutenberg’s moveable type; it was going to revolutionise the world, and it did, only in a way that I didn’t foresee.”
“For me, that’s the internet now. There’s just no escape. It’s kind of the worst – it’s become the worst thing that you could imagine.”
“Thom Yorke: But going back to the artwork and the music, to me, the creatures in the Amnesiac artwork really felt like the abstracted, semi-comical, stupidly dark false voices that battled us as we tried to work. Personifications of the mood of the time, that flowed in and out of the songs and writing. The faceless terrorists; the self-serving politicians; corporate bigwigs hugging. It’s there in Fear Stalks the Land as well: there are these people trapped, this character, this person trapped in this set of walls they built themselves, and they can’t get out no matter what they do.
“Stanley Donwood: We spent months or years or however long it was generating all this material, writing and pictures and ideas, and then just had to distil it down and distil it down into these two record sleeves, and that was leaving behind a lot of work.”
“I had no desire to preserve it or archive it. Luckily Thom did”
“We could just kind of splurge, and then focus on what was good from the splurge, so all of this stuff – now, twenty years later – I really like it. It’s slightly like the diary scribblings of a couple of mad people, but it’s also very . . . of the time.”
“Stanley Donwood: It’s very easy to discard stuff that you on your own – as an individual –
think was rubbish, but in fact it’s really good. And at the same time you might not want to discard things that should be discarded. It’s much more productive working with other people than it is working alone, I think.”
“. And with the writing as well – it was a very kind of like – back and forth. I tend towards a very over-meticulous, over-detailed, slightly anally retentive style of writing and drawing and painting as well. And Thom’s sort of the opposite.
Thom Yorke: Couldn’t be more opposite.”
“Stanley Donwood: Kid A has always been my favourite record, because it was so difficult. It was so hard; it was wrenched out. I’m more proud of it because it was so unlikely.”
“Thom Yorke: I would like to think that the freaky nature of how we went about doing all of this, for anybody that’s interested – I hope it inspires a way of celebrating this idea of process. Just to let the boat drift and see where it’s going to go.”
“Out of the First World War, and out of all the positivism of the Industrial Revolution, there was this disillusionment in the 1920s, right? You had this terrible Spanish flu, millions of people dying – and at some point it lifts. It all lifts, and then you get the Roaring Twenties. You get this explosion in music and art and film.”
“What’s really interesting is that we’re witnessing on one side a determination by certain states, like Britain, to engage us in some horrific kind of doublethink.”
“Being told how wonderful everything is when literally thousands of people are dying every day. Being told by the government how well they’re doing.
That’s what we’re ingesting. But we’re also desperate for something real and true that speaks to us. People have been reading more. They’ve been watching films more”
“Kid A and Amnesiac are, if nothing else, a celebration of what is possible when a bunch of people get together and forget about everything except trying to create work that speaks to them at that moment, in a sort of frenzied, last-days-on-earth kind of way.
I don’t know why we thought it was the last days on earth, but I guess we did – it was the millennium, whatever. But that kind of madness is important”
“Thom Yorke: There’s a weird thing about Kid A and Amnesiac. If you isolate lyrics or elements of the artwork, so much of it is indulging in this crazy sense of isolation and disintegration. But when we got to the end of the process, I felt the total opposite of that. I felt there was an underlying unity to what we’d done
– a desire to express something beyond all the anxiety and excessiveness and self-destructive analytical bullshit. Maybe this is why the landscape thing was so important. In the end the music and the art that we made had a weird sort of holisticness to it.”
“Stanley Donwood: It’s not a scrapbook; it’s not a collection of singles – it’s a complete entity, the music and the artwork and the blips and the way it was promoted, or not promoted. It was a very cohesive art project. Better than art school.”
“Stanley Donwood: I can’t believe I was such a fucking pessimist. Now that global warming”
“has been sorted out and all conflict has been resolved, my gloomy take on existence seems ludicrous”
“And the changes that have happened to society, culture and our understanding of history are also huge”
“THOM YORKE: At that time we had this dream of a workshop space: an open space for lots of ideas”
“We wanted to be completely independent in every aspect of the production element of everything we were doing. And at the same time everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this con-gratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at. So it was impossible to even start work, for a long time.
“Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of jingoistic triumphalism in popular culture”
“Thom Yorke: We felt that there was a sort of uncomfortable shift in awareness going on.”
“What we were listening to, what we were reading, was the total opposite of that. The phrase ‘spin with a grin’ was flying around at the time, because of the aggressive and self-serving PR tone coming out of the New Labour government.”
“It was a strange new phenomenon to behold, and one now taken for granted: an obsession with how one looks rather than what one does.”
“Stanley Donwood: There was a lot of disappointment about integrity, or lack thereof, pertaining to Tony Blair. We’d made all this artwork that depicted fires, nuclear explosions over America and the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center . . . and then 9/11 happened and you had to go and promote the record in America”
“Thom Yorke: But why were we so obsessed, for example, with drawing the trees and all that sort of stuff? Part of it was that I had made the decision to sort of spend a lot of time in Cornwall, and Stan and I were travelling around a lot together in the landscape . . .”
“Stanley Donwood: David Hockney in the Pompidou. Incredible”
“And that’s what kicked the whole thing off: let’s make these massive landscapes, these epic things”
“Stanley Donwood: I thought it would be really funny if we painted just in shades of blue and purple.”
“Thom Yorke: It coincided with the fact that I’d a had a complete creative block, and Rachel, my partner at the time, had said, ‘Stop trying to make music. Stop completely for a while.’ So I was wandering around just drawing anything I could see. Landscape. So landscape became an extremely important part of what was going on, because it loosened me up. When I did eventually start thinking about music and we started getting together again, landscape had freed me up, and I know Stan was into that stuff as well.”
“Stanley Donwood: Just creating a world in which you can tell a story. I felt like I was just full of stuff that I wanted to get out – all these ideas, all these interpretations of current affairs, politics, history. But it felt like you couldn’t do it in isolation: you had to build some sort of structure that it would make sense in, otherwise you’d just be a loony on a bus.”
“Thom Yorke: You can pick up either of our sketchbooks at the time and both the mono-logues are perpetually self-destructive. So the act of sitting down in front of a landscape and just trying to represent that in whatever way we felt – choosing to listen to that and not any of the shit in your head – was a massively freeing experience. I spent a lot of time alone, trying to get rid of this self-destructive noise in the head”
“So things will pop out and you’ll be like: ‘I’ve no idea how that arrived.’ That’s always the case to some extent. But this one was like a tortuous journey from almost total gridlock – complete lack of confidence, complete cynicism in our own success, not feeling in any way connected culturally with what was going on in our own country, but at the same time being aware that we were in a really privileged position.”
“Thom Yorke: At that point I was fucking hard to work with musically, because I had a very fixed idea in my mind of what something was, and I would not shut up until it happened, which was very hard for the rest of the guys. But when we finally made it to our own studio, I had this choice to walk away, and go and play with Stan instead. It gave the others space, but it also inspired me in a different way.”
“Stanley Donwood: It felt as if you heard the music in a different way when you were up in the mezzanine as well, because you’re a kind of observer then. You’re not in the making space.”
“Thom Yorke: Because it was the Radiohead studio, we were able to work on the artwork in the same way that the band were working on the music. We could just try loads of stuff”
“There was a moment where – as far as I was concerned – we totally forgot about the idea that we were even making a record”
“There was a point where everybody had to say to me, ‘All right, look . . . we need to move on to the next bit.’ But it was a long time before that happened – months and months.”
“Stanley Donwood: The music seemed to speak to me in a way that Radiohead’s previous music hadn’t done. It felt very now; it felt very important in some way. And so all I had to do was find a way of extracting what the music looked like from the music.”
“Stanley Donwood: It felt like – if a method was developing, that was a bad thing. If you’re doing things by a method you just end up with the same result in different iterations.”
“We were trying to destroy methods, to destroy habit. Basically, really perversely trying to make things as difficult as we could all the time.”
“Stanley Donwood: The two records to me, in my head, felt very different. Kid A was these increasingly urgent answerphone messages left on a phone that no one ever listened to, and Amnesiac – I had this idea that Amnesiac was songs that had been left in a drawer in an old dusty chest of drawers that had been left in an attic. So both of them were kind of . . . kind of crying out for attention, but had been forgotten”
“Thom Yorke: I don’t know why you started drawing minotaurs – I don’t know why that started.
Stanley Donwood: The labyrinth.”
“Thom Yorke: He was banging on about this all the time, the labyrinth thing.
“Stanley Donwood: I was obsessed with it . . .
“Thom Yorke: On and on and on he went. And it really formed part of what was happening. The minotaur cursed to repeat its mistakes in a maze.”
“Stanley Donwood: I was a real evangelist for the internet in the beginning; I thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to be like Gutenberg’s moveable type; it was going to revolutionise the world, and it did, only in a way that I didn’t foresee.”
“For me, that’s the internet now. There’s just no escape. It’s kind of the worst – it’s become the worst thing that you could imagine.”
“Thom Yorke: But going back to the artwork and the music, to me, the creatures in the Amnesiac artwork really felt like the abstracted, semi-comical, stupidly dark false voices that battled us as we tried to work. Personifications of the mood of the time, that flowed in and out of the songs and writing. The faceless terrorists; the self-serving politicians; corporate bigwigs hugging. It’s there in Fear Stalks the Land as well: there are these people trapped, this character, this person trapped in this set of walls they built themselves, and they can’t get out no matter what they do.
“Stanley Donwood: We spent months or years or however long it was generating all this material, writing and pictures and ideas, and then just had to distil it down and distil it down into these two record sleeves, and that was leaving behind a lot of work.”
“I had no desire to preserve it or archive it. Luckily Thom did”
“We could just kind of splurge, and then focus on what was good from the splurge, so all of this stuff – now, twenty years later – I really like it. It’s slightly like the diary scribblings of a couple of mad people, but it’s also very . . . of the time.”
“Stanley Donwood: It’s very easy to discard stuff that you on your own – as an individual –
think was rubbish, but in fact it’s really good. And at the same time you might not want to discard things that should be discarded. It’s much more productive working with other people than it is working alone, I think.”
“. And with the writing as well – it was a very kind of like – back and forth. I tend towards a very over-meticulous, over-detailed, slightly anally retentive style of writing and drawing and painting as well. And Thom’s sort of the opposite.
Thom Yorke: Couldn’t be more opposite.”
“Stanley Donwood: Kid A has always been my favourite record, because it was so difficult. It was so hard; it was wrenched out. I’m more proud of it because it was so unlikely.”
“Thom Yorke: I would like to think that the freaky nature of how we went about doing all of this, for anybody that’s interested – I hope it inspires a way of celebrating this idea of process. Just to let the boat drift and see where it’s going to go.”
“Out of the First World War, and out of all the positivism of the Industrial Revolution, there was this disillusionment in the 1920s, right? You had this terrible Spanish flu, millions of people dying – and at some point it lifts. It all lifts, and then you get the Roaring Twenties. You get this explosion in music and art and film.”
“What’s really interesting is that we’re witnessing on one side a determination by certain states, like Britain, to engage us in some horrific kind of doublethink.”
“Being told how wonderful everything is when literally thousands of people are dying every day. Being told by the government how well they’re doing.
That’s what we’re ingesting. But we’re also desperate for something real and true that speaks to us. People have been reading more. They’ve been watching films more”
“Kid A and Amnesiac are, if nothing else, a celebration of what is possible when a bunch of people get together and forget about everything except trying to create work that speaks to them at that moment, in a sort of frenzied, last-days-on-earth kind of way.
I don’t know why we thought it was the last days on earth, but I guess we did – it was the millennium, whatever. But that kind of madness is important”
“Thom Yorke: There’s a weird thing about Kid A and Amnesiac. If you isolate lyrics or elements of the artwork, so much of it is indulging in this crazy sense of isolation and disintegration. But when we got to the end of the process, I felt the total opposite of that. I felt there was an underlying unity to what we’d done
– a desire to express something beyond all the anxiety and excessiveness and self-destructive analytical bullshit. Maybe this is why the landscape thing was so important. In the end the music and the art that we made had a weird sort of holisticness to it.”
“Stanley Donwood: It’s not a scrapbook; it’s not a collection of singles – it’s a complete entity, the music and the artwork and the blips and the way it was promoted, or not promoted. It was a very cohesive art project. Better than art school.”
“Stanley Donwood: I can’t believe I was such a fucking pessimist. Now that global warming”
“has been sorted out and all conflict has been resolved, my gloomy take on existence seems ludicrous”
July 15, 2022
Nunca había comprado un libro de arte. Se me había hecho, si no ridículo, diferente al tipo de consumo que espero de un libro. Quizá es que por mucho tiempo he esperado que al leer un libro tardaré mucho tiempo en una página, y si la paso rápidamente no estoy “leyendo”. De cualquier manera, a estas alturas de mi vida, entiendo la lectura como una actividad que va más allá de solo leer texto, además de que juzgaba mal el hecho de pasar hojas rápidamente en un libro de arte, cuando una sola imagen puede dar para tanta reflexión, además de que un libro de arte siento que está ahí para futuras referencias; para regresar y digerirlo en más de una ocasión. Además, Kid A Mnesia no es un libro de arte común.
Quizá sonará injustificada esta postura pues como admití previamente, nunca había tenido uno de estos, sin embargo, sí conozco la naturaleza usual de los mismos: ya sea que un libro contenga en sí pinturas o piezas artísticas cuyo fin fueron ellas mismas, o bien, que involucre piezas creadas para una producción audiovisual mayor como una película, videojuego o similar. Probablemente es mi ignorancia, pero me resulta interesante encontrar un libro de arte, que, aunque bien, muchas de estas obras se podrían ver como piezas cuya finalidad es existir en sí, se entienden más como parte de un proceso artístico holístico, donde en la búsqueda de un sonido diferente para partir del histórico OK Computer, Thom Yorke y Stanley Donwood se pusieron a experimentar con diferentes tipos de imágenes. Se trata de un ejercicio de canalizar energía, pensamientos y laberintos que poco a poco llevaron a ambos, y a la larga, a la banda, a toparse con lo que sería Kid A y Amnesiac, comúnmente vistos como “discos hermanos” pues salieron de las mismas sesiones de grabación.
Mucho he leído ya sobre Radiohead —es mi banda favorita— y mucho de cómo fue, o se ha registrado que fue el proceso tras la producción de sus discos. Corolario, se suele anteponer el proceso de Yorke, pues es el cantante, el liricista y el frontman. Este libro lleva su nombre en alto junto a no otro integrante de la banda cuyo rol sea el de un instrumentista, sino el del artista que ha creado las portadas de los discos de la banda por muchos años. Es por eso que este libro siento que revela nuevas facetas de este proceso: donde hasta se podría entender a Radiohead como una banda multimediática, no solo un proyecto que se pueda entender musicalmente. Aún así, ese último comentario puede terminar resonando como una pedantería o falsedad; si no una falsedad, como una imagen incompleta. Creo que los discos en sí son los que más hablan por sí solos, pero este libro de arte genera un contexto muy interesante alrededor de las letras, las atmósferas sonoras, así como cualquier otro contenido producido a partir de esas sesiones: los blips / videos musicales, así como claro, el recientemente lanzado Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, esa exhibición virtual / videojuego / recorrido donde mucho del material de este libro se nos es presentado en forma de un laberinto interactivo, con todo y fragmentos cortados del disco, que concluye con ¿videos musicales interactivos? Que nos dejan vivir la música y el arte de una manera imposible mediante otros medios.
A pesar de la plétora de contenido, entrevistas incluidas así como la anteriormente mencionada exhibición virtual, el libro de arte se levanta por sus propios méritos. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition cumple un propósito que el libro no y vice-versa. El libro nos deja ver una evolución, una reiteración de elementos y su proceso mientras se van convirtiendo de garabatos a pinturas, a texto, a garabatos, a reproducciones digitales, a pósters y material promocional para los discos terminados. Es por eso que aunque recomiendo muy ampliamente haber experimentado Kid A y Amnesiac previamente —y dudo que alguien que compre esto no lo haya hecho—, sería interesante tener la perspectiva de alguien que se introduce a este mundo a partir de este libro y luego encuentra los discos. Definitivamente, este libro, junto a todo lo que ha sacado la banda en estos últimos años por motivo del 20 aniversario del proyecto genera un panorama transmediático, donde demuestran que la música tan fascinante que hicieron ha trascendido y se ha convertido en algo más, aunque para ser justos, siempre fue más que música, solo que apenas nos están dando las llaves a esos oscuros laberintos que se imaginaron hace más de veinte años.
[imaginen que aquí me extiendo más sobre Kid A Mnesia Exhibition]
Tal vez mi única queja es que el libro no ahonda en la forma en la que mucho de este material fue producido. Aunque igual creo que no es necesario, y hasta cierto punto entiendo la intención de dejar ambigüo el proceso (más allá de esas páginas iniciales donde revelan muchas de las intenciones de aquél entonces, y sí, comentan aproximadamente sobre el proceso pero más de una manera ideológica), hubiera sido genial algún texto explicando cómo pintaron estas piezas, o si duplicaban el arte y luego hacían las versiones alternas con recortes, si las alteraban digitalmente o pasaban por otro proceso, y especialmente, en la segunda mitad del libro, donde pasan de lleno a piezas producidas enteramente por computadora, y donde hubiera sido interesante conocer con qué tecnología de la época lograron generar aquello.
Pero lo entiendo. Como ‘artista’, entusiasta del arte y como el pedante que puedo llegar a ser, entiendo por qué decidieron lanzarlo de esta manera; a veces es curioso cómo se puede sacar material que puede parecer que resuelve dudas, pero en vez, solo amplía las dudas. A la vez, es sumamente inspirador y apasionante entender esta obra como un cúmulo de garabatos y pinceladas que han despertado tanto interés por parte del público. No me gusta idolatrar a la gente, incluso si son artistas que me han inspirado mucho; no creo que haya personas que sean superiores a los demás, y todos tenemos laberintos internos que si pudieran ser expuestos y tuvieran la difusión adecuada, estoy seguro que resultarían igual de interesantes, sin embargo, y justo por eso, entiendo este fenómeno o condición como el resultado de una serie de eventos causados a partir de múltiples factores que nos permiten acceder a piezas que nos dejan indagar un poquito más en una cabeza, o serie de cabezas, que al público en general les han resultado interesantes, han influenciado a tantos otros artistas, y lo seguirán haciendo en años por venir.
[imaginen que aquí hablo más a detalle sobre el proceso creativo, la importancia del resto de los miembros de la banda, la colaboración y el resultado o el ‘fin’ práctico que fue la realización de ambos discos]
[imaginen que aquí hablo sobre minotauros, laberintos, el aleph y mitología]
[imaginen que aquí hablo sobre la paranoia, el miedo, la crisis, existencialismo, reproducción, internet, el futuro y el sinsentido]
[imaginen que aquí hablo de la parte intermedia "Kid Alphabet", Cortázar, House of Leaves, el internet (otra vez), el hipertexto y los laberintos (otra vez, otra vez)]
[imaginen, pues, lo anterior, luego regresen y concluyan la reseña]
Y bueno, qué puedo decir de los discos en sí que no se haya dicho ya. Igual, los he escuchado tantas veces que no sé si me quede por decir algo que no haya pensado o sentido ya. Kid A es definitivamente uno de los mejores discos que he escuchado, y aunque usualmente no se tiene en tan buena estima, en lo personal, hay días en los que Amnesiac me parece ligeramente mejor por su atmósfera incluso más desoladora que el otro. Kid A es un disco que tengo que estar mentalmente preparado para escuchar por todo lo que implica contextualmente; por otro lado, siento que Amnesiac es un disco que he termino escuchando mucho a la media noche, y es mucho mejor acompañante en ese aspecto. Kid A es un disco que suelo poner para escuchar las primeras 4 canciones, y no siempre estoy con los ánimos de escuchar el resto. Amnesiac es ese disco que pongo por una canción y me dejo llevar. Kid A se siente como morir y ascender al cielo; Amnesiac se siente como pasar por el infierno y purgatorio; tal vez por eso suelo preferir el segundo. Definitivamente una de las cosas que más disfruté de ver el libro, fue hacerlo mientras volvía a escuchar ambos una y otra vez.
Grandísima compra; valió cada centavo.
10/10.
Quizá sonará injustificada esta postura pues como admití previamente, nunca había tenido uno de estos, sin embargo, sí conozco la naturaleza usual de los mismos: ya sea que un libro contenga en sí pinturas o piezas artísticas cuyo fin fueron ellas mismas, o bien, que involucre piezas creadas para una producción audiovisual mayor como una película, videojuego o similar. Probablemente es mi ignorancia, pero me resulta interesante encontrar un libro de arte, que, aunque bien, muchas de estas obras se podrían ver como piezas cuya finalidad es existir en sí, se entienden más como parte de un proceso artístico holístico, donde en la búsqueda de un sonido diferente para partir del histórico OK Computer, Thom Yorke y Stanley Donwood se pusieron a experimentar con diferentes tipos de imágenes. Se trata de un ejercicio de canalizar energía, pensamientos y laberintos que poco a poco llevaron a ambos, y a la larga, a la banda, a toparse con lo que sería Kid A y Amnesiac, comúnmente vistos como “discos hermanos” pues salieron de las mismas sesiones de grabación.
Mucho he leído ya sobre Radiohead —es mi banda favorita— y mucho de cómo fue, o se ha registrado que fue el proceso tras la producción de sus discos. Corolario, se suele anteponer el proceso de Yorke, pues es el cantante, el liricista y el frontman. Este libro lleva su nombre en alto junto a no otro integrante de la banda cuyo rol sea el de un instrumentista, sino el del artista que ha creado las portadas de los discos de la banda por muchos años. Es por eso que este libro siento que revela nuevas facetas de este proceso: donde hasta se podría entender a Radiohead como una banda multimediática, no solo un proyecto que se pueda entender musicalmente. Aún así, ese último comentario puede terminar resonando como una pedantería o falsedad; si no una falsedad, como una imagen incompleta. Creo que los discos en sí son los que más hablan por sí solos, pero este libro de arte genera un contexto muy interesante alrededor de las letras, las atmósferas sonoras, así como cualquier otro contenido producido a partir de esas sesiones: los blips / videos musicales, así como claro, el recientemente lanzado Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, esa exhibición virtual / videojuego / recorrido donde mucho del material de este libro se nos es presentado en forma de un laberinto interactivo, con todo y fragmentos cortados del disco, que concluye con ¿videos musicales interactivos? Que nos dejan vivir la música y el arte de una manera imposible mediante otros medios.
A pesar de la plétora de contenido, entrevistas incluidas así como la anteriormente mencionada exhibición virtual, el libro de arte se levanta por sus propios méritos. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition cumple un propósito que el libro no y vice-versa. El libro nos deja ver una evolución, una reiteración de elementos y su proceso mientras se van convirtiendo de garabatos a pinturas, a texto, a garabatos, a reproducciones digitales, a pósters y material promocional para los discos terminados. Es por eso que aunque recomiendo muy ampliamente haber experimentado Kid A y Amnesiac previamente —y dudo que alguien que compre esto no lo haya hecho—, sería interesante tener la perspectiva de alguien que se introduce a este mundo a partir de este libro y luego encuentra los discos. Definitivamente, este libro, junto a todo lo que ha sacado la banda en estos últimos años por motivo del 20 aniversario del proyecto genera un panorama transmediático, donde demuestran que la música tan fascinante que hicieron ha trascendido y se ha convertido en algo más, aunque para ser justos, siempre fue más que música, solo que apenas nos están dando las llaves a esos oscuros laberintos que se imaginaron hace más de veinte años.
[imaginen que aquí me extiendo más sobre Kid A Mnesia Exhibition]
Tal vez mi única queja es que el libro no ahonda en la forma en la que mucho de este material fue producido. Aunque igual creo que no es necesario, y hasta cierto punto entiendo la intención de dejar ambigüo el proceso (más allá de esas páginas iniciales donde revelan muchas de las intenciones de aquél entonces, y sí, comentan aproximadamente sobre el proceso pero más de una manera ideológica), hubiera sido genial algún texto explicando cómo pintaron estas piezas, o si duplicaban el arte y luego hacían las versiones alternas con recortes, si las alteraban digitalmente o pasaban por otro proceso, y especialmente, en la segunda mitad del libro, donde pasan de lleno a piezas producidas enteramente por computadora, y donde hubiera sido interesante conocer con qué tecnología de la época lograron generar aquello.
Pero lo entiendo. Como ‘artista’, entusiasta del arte y como el pedante que puedo llegar a ser, entiendo por qué decidieron lanzarlo de esta manera; a veces es curioso cómo se puede sacar material que puede parecer que resuelve dudas, pero en vez, solo amplía las dudas. A la vez, es sumamente inspirador y apasionante entender esta obra como un cúmulo de garabatos y pinceladas que han despertado tanto interés por parte del público. No me gusta idolatrar a la gente, incluso si son artistas que me han inspirado mucho; no creo que haya personas que sean superiores a los demás, y todos tenemos laberintos internos que si pudieran ser expuestos y tuvieran la difusión adecuada, estoy seguro que resultarían igual de interesantes, sin embargo, y justo por eso, entiendo este fenómeno o condición como el resultado de una serie de eventos causados a partir de múltiples factores que nos permiten acceder a piezas que nos dejan indagar un poquito más en una cabeza, o serie de cabezas, que al público en general les han resultado interesantes, han influenciado a tantos otros artistas, y lo seguirán haciendo en años por venir.
[imaginen que aquí hablo más a detalle sobre el proceso creativo, la importancia del resto de los miembros de la banda, la colaboración y el resultado o el ‘fin’ práctico que fue la realización de ambos discos]
[imaginen que aquí hablo sobre minotauros, laberintos, el aleph y mitología]
[imaginen que aquí hablo sobre la paranoia, el miedo, la crisis, existencialismo, reproducción, internet, el futuro y el sinsentido]
[imaginen que aquí hablo de la parte intermedia "Kid Alphabet", Cortázar, House of Leaves, el internet (otra vez), el hipertexto y los laberintos (otra vez, otra vez)]
[imaginen, pues, lo anterior, luego regresen y concluyan la reseña]
Y bueno, qué puedo decir de los discos en sí que no se haya dicho ya. Igual, los he escuchado tantas veces que no sé si me quede por decir algo que no haya pensado o sentido ya. Kid A es definitivamente uno de los mejores discos que he escuchado, y aunque usualmente no se tiene en tan buena estima, en lo personal, hay días en los que Amnesiac me parece ligeramente mejor por su atmósfera incluso más desoladora que el otro. Kid A es un disco que tengo que estar mentalmente preparado para escuchar por todo lo que implica contextualmente; por otro lado, siento que Amnesiac es un disco que he termino escuchando mucho a la media noche, y es mucho mejor acompañante en ese aspecto. Kid A es un disco que suelo poner para escuchar las primeras 4 canciones, y no siempre estoy con los ánimos de escuchar el resto. Amnesiac es ese disco que pongo por una canción y me dejo llevar. Kid A se siente como morir y ascender al cielo; Amnesiac se siente como pasar por el infierno y purgatorio; tal vez por eso suelo preferir el segundo. Definitivamente una de las cosas que más disfruté de ver el libro, fue hacerlo mientras volvía a escuchar ambos una y otra vez.
Grandísima compra; valió cada centavo.
10/10.
April 20, 2022
So sexy. Art + Music = Sad
IM AM NOT MAKING SENSE BUT OK YEAH COOL BOOK AND YEAH
IM AM NOT MAKING SENSE BUT OK YEAH COOL BOOK AND YEAH
February 5, 2024
Incrível o contato que os ensaios escritos por thom yorke e stanley donwood firmam com o leitor através das obras sonoras e visuais…
O ensaio de how to disappear completely acabou comigo da melhor maneira possível
O ensaio de how to disappear completely acabou comigo da melhor maneira possível
May 30, 2025
A Fine Art book, a bit lacking in (con)text. Stanley Donwood’s book from a couple of years earlier (There Will Be No Quiet) covered much of the same art and much more with an abundance of background info; it spoiled me i guess. If you like his art and can find that book, get it.
December 30, 2025
Kid A and Amnesiac are two of my favourite albums ever so it's only natural that I'd go and buy this. I love the artworks from all Radiohead albums but the ones from these two albums always stuck out to me and are my absolute favourites so it's always fun looking through this <3
May 1, 2022
Reading and pursuing the artwork while listening to the album is a beautiful & haunting experience. There was quite a bit of interesting notations by the artist and Thom. A must for Radiohead fans.
December 16, 2022
The best Radiohead era. The world surrounding Kid A and Amnesiac is truly rich and immersive.
December 17, 2023
I love Stanley Donwood's artwork so much. There is something so haunting and magical about it, it goes so perfectly with Radiohead songs. This is definitely one of my fav artbooks.
March 15, 2024
Virgincore
March 25, 2024
thom yorke and stanley donwood i love you
Read
October 30, 2024irgendwann wenn ich allein lebe kann das auf meinem wohnzimmertisch liegen um meinen zukünftigen gästen zu signalisieren dass ich ein loser bin
April 28, 2025
One of my all time favourite art books.
May 24, 2022
Kid A was my Radiohead album, but I never considered them a 'multi-media' band. I thought the best part was the beginning conversation between Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke. The middle essay of the 'Alphabet' was a little unneccesary
November 24, 2024
Don’t bother with essays in the middle, pretentious twaddle .
July 25, 2025
Cute pictures
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews