Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has written an eight-hour organ composition
Radiohead guitarist and film composer Jonny Greenwood has written an organ composition with a runtime of eight hours, titled ‘268 Years of Reverb’.
Following the release of The Smile’s sophomore record Wall of Eyes earlier in the year, Greenwood has moved his focus to organ music. “The organ is the lungs and voice of any biolding where it is installed,” he shared.
Greenwood continued: “In an old church, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound.”
The composition will be played by James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival in May. The performance will take place in the Octagon Chapel. Tickets will be available for the entire eight-hour performance, or for one hour and 50 minutes of the composition.
“In the Octagon Chapel, it’s 268 years of time,” Greenwood explained, “season after season spent celebrating, commiserating, praising, mourning, to the same recorded sounds. This time is measured over generations, through the rituals of the church, and is a reminder that churches are the repository for the books of parish records as well as Bibles.”
The lengthy composition was inspired by “the classical Indian approach to melodies, where new notes are introduced very gradually into improvised solos.” Greenwood suggested that this increases tension while listening.
In January, Greenwood and his The Smile bandmates released their second record, Wall of Eyes. In a four-and-a-half star review of the record, Far Out wrote, “Much like the album artwork, created as usual by Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the music within is haunting, even in its colourful moments, driven by lyrical angst and insidious instrumental juxtaposition.”
“Wall of Eyes is not a salient masterpiece of the Yorke-Greenwood canon but a more than worthy addition to the bulletproof saga. What happens next is anyone’s guess,” the review concluded.
Revisit the record below.
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