Not P but Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson and Techno Dystopia Piece

[Allan Balliett]

The short musical film directed by Anderson for Yorke's newest album
started on US Netflix today


"A short film by Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix accompanies the album,
sequencing “Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus” into a single
audiovisual suite. Its opening shots—a subway car full of commuters in drab
colors, their exaggerated movements a herky-jerky pantomime of restless
slumber—explicitly link back to those ANIMA Technologies subway ads,
playfully smudging the edges of the album’s world and our own. Exquisitely
choreographed by Damien Jalet, the film takes the form of a dream sequence,
following Yorke as he follows a woman (played by his partner, Dajana
Roncione) along a labyrinthine subterranean course.
If there’s a more perfect image of absence than these ashes dancing in
midair, I don’t know it. Anderson’s film ends with Yorke awakening on the
train, alone, his face bathed in the light of daybreak as “Dawn Chorus”
winds down. A moment before, he and Roncione have been locked in an
intimate embrace, but as he opens his eyes, it is clear that he is alone.
The song’s title has been a part of Radiohead lore for years now; only they
know what other forms it might have taken, other meanings it might have
accrued. But here, on a song starkly unadorned, Yorke expands his already
vast catalog with a perfect, unforgettable song, an elegy for the dreams
that cannot be retrieved. "


Thom Yorke's Anima in PASTE
<https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/06/thom-yorke-announces-new-album-anima.html?utm_source=PMNL&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=190620>

Thom Yorke – ANIMA (2019)

Thom YorkeEarlier this month, a strange advertisement for ANIMA
Technologies appeared inside London’s Tube. The company purported to have
built something called a “Dream Camera,” a device capable of capturing the
world of the unconscious: “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your
dreams back,” the copy promised. But curious callers were treated to a
cryptic voice message, a jumble of stilted legalese read in a thin,
unctuous voice, that apparently rendered the Dream Camera’s promise moot:
something about a cease and desist from the High Court, an admission of
“serious and flagrant unlawful activities.”
There were only ever two things this ad could be: Some exhausting promo for
the worst “Black Mirror” episode yet or an oblique tease of Thom Yorke’s
third solo album, ANIMA. Dreams and a healthy distrust of a techno-dystopia
have long been pillars of Radiohead and Yorke’s songwriting. The wires of
the brain and the wires of the world are forever being crossed: Fake
plastic trees, paranoid androids, mobiles chirping, low-flying panic
attacks. So of course the man who has sung about the narcotized rhythms of
urban life would want to snap commuters out of their reveries with a
once-in-a-lifetime promise. Dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking haunt the
songs of ANIMA, Yorke’s most ambitious and assured solo album yet. It is
the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead,
floating uneasily through the space between societal turmoil and internal
monologue.

ANIMA is the product of what Yorke has described as an extended period of
anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and
fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Yorke’s solo material has
always sounded anxious, sometimes to its detriment. Where The Eraser, his
solo debut, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium
tension into compellingly moody electronic abstractions, 2014’s Tomorrow’s
Modern Boxes too often felt claustrophobic, morose, enervated. In contrast,
ANIMA’s tone throughout is meaty, full-blooded, often a little menacing.
Yorke’s melancholy has grown teeth.
Yorke has long been a fan of left-of-center dance music; remixes
commissioned for The Eraser and The King of Limbs constituted a who’s who
of the European club vanguard. But this is the first of his own productions
where it feels like he and longtime production partner Nigel Godrich really
get it, where their beatmaking strides beyond contemporary fashion. The
influence of James Holden and his Border Community label, an avant-techno
touchstone, is all over ANIMA’s burly bass synths and jabbing pulses.
Syncopated, spring-loaded grooves are reminiscent of Four Tet and Floating
Points; the blippy “Not the News” channels Zomby and Actress. Yet for all
the music’s heavy electronic bent, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic
grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy synths surging in
waves, feeling restless and hungry. Yorke treats climaxes with a boxer’s
strategy—feinting, falling back, changing the angle of his attack.

Critics have sometimes complained—understandably, if not always
correctly—that Yorke’s solo work has felt incomplete. As frontman and
linchpin of one of the world’s most dynamic rock bands, Yorke has had to
work doubly hard to convince listeners that his late nights in front of a
laptop are equally worthy of their attention. But ANIMA proves how much he
and Godrich are capable of on their own. His bandmates’ influence colored
The Eraser; on the more unmoored Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, their absence
loomed large. But here he and Godrich have perfected a sound of their own,
one that doesn’t take Radiohead’s achievements as its primary unit of
measurement.

Track after track, Yorke proves the importance of stripping back. It’s
remarkable how much he can make out of so little: The best songs here get
by on the strength of just one or two synthesizer patches, a handful of
electronic drum sounds—mostly just scraped white noise, plus the occasional
booming kick drum—and his voice, processed and layered as often as is
needed. “Impossible Knots” rides a propulsive electric bassline that lands
somewhere between Afrobeat and Fugazi; the closing “Runawayaway” makes
trance-like use of Tuareg-inspired desert blues guitar. There’s not much
else. Every element practically dares you to so much as ask for any further
accompaniment.

There are a few outright topical songs—“The Axe” (“Goddamned machinery, why
don’t you speak to me?/One day I am gonna take an axe to you”) will
resonate with anyone who suspects technological progress is moving in the
wrong direction—but for the most part, Yorke’s lyrics remain imagistic,
non-specific, as intractable as eye floaters. Fragmentary lines play out
like pages ripped from a journal on the nightstand. Sometimes he seems to
be muttering to himself; elsewhere his voice is chopped into a jumble of
words dangled teasingly near the outer limits of meaning. “Twist” ends with
an incantation that might be straight from a horror film: “A boy on a bike
who is running away/An empty car in the woods, the motor left running.”
We’re whipped back into the hypnopompic logic of Yorke’s tangled thoughts,
the fogged film of ANIMA’s Dream Camera.

A short film by Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix accompanies the album,
sequencing “Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus” into a single
audiovisual suite. Its opening shots—a subway car full of commuters in drab
colors, their exaggerated movements a herky-jerky pantomime of restless
slumber—explicitly link back to those ANIMA Technologies subway ads,
playfully smudging the edges of the album’s world and our own. Exquisitely
choreographed by Damien Jalet, the film takes the form of a dream sequence,
following Yorke as he follows a woman (played by his partner, Dajana
Roncione) along a labyrinthine subterranean course.
If there’s a more perfect image of absence than these ashes dancing in
midair, I don’t know it. Anderson’s film ends with Yorke awakening on the
train, alone, his face bathed in the light of daybreak as “Dawn Chorus”
winds down. A moment before, he and Roncione have been locked in an
intimate embrace, but as he opens his eyes, it is clear that he is alone.
The song’s title has been a part of Radiohead lore for years now; only they
know what other forms it might have taken, other meanings it might have
accrued. But here, on a song starkly unadorned, Yorke expands his already
vast catalog with a perfect, unforgettable song, an elegy for the dreams
that cannot be retrieved. — Pitchfork