When Radiohead moved away from guitar-centred rock on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood became fascinated by the Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot at the end of the 1920s.
Its eerie continuous tones are usually associated with early electronic composition and composers such as Olivier Messiaen. Radiohead placed that sound inside a completely different musical environment.
One of the stranger examples appears on the title track.
In a BBC interview, Colin and Jonny Greenwood explained that Thom Yorke sang through a vocoder while the notes controlling that vocoder were triggered from the Ondes Martenot.
Think about that signal chain.
A human voice enters a vocoder.
An electronic instrument designed almost seventy years earlier determines the pitches through which that voice is reconstructed.
The result sounds futuristic.
That reversal interests me. New music does not always come from new technology.
Sometimes an old instrument becomes radical again simply because nobody expected to find it in that context.
Electronic instruments age differently from acoustic ones. A violin rarely becomes obsolete. A synthesizer often does, at least commercially. Then enough time passes and its limitations become interesting again.
The future occasionally needs equipment that everyone else has already left behind.
https://citizeninsane.eu/media/uk/bbc/04/i11a_2001-01-20_bbcrad3.html
