Hmm it’s my first blog and I’m already talking about Radiohead (sort of), this may be a bad sign. Still I think this is pretty interesting.

This past year Jonny Greenwood, multi-instrumentalist and all around cool music guy in Radiohead, was asked to be the composer in residence for BBC radio. While holding that position he composed a piece entitled “popcorn superhet receiver”. The name has something to do with Ham radio or something. Anyway, Jonny says he composed the piece as a sort of meditation on white noise, or something like that. I think it’s really cool, and some of the most interesting modern classical music I’ve heard in a pretty long time, so if you have 16 minutes to spare I would check it out – to get the full experience try to listen all the way through in one go. If you saw There Will Be Blood some of the music will sound familiar to you, as he took excerpts of the piece to combine with his original score for the movie. Unfortunately this also disqualified him from getting an oscar nomination for best original score. A tragedy if you ask me.

The recording is from the first American playing of the piece, streamed from a public radio site. All you have to do is scroll down to the little window with the piece’s name and hit the play button.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/wordlessmusic/episodes/2008/01/16