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

[Mark Kohut]

I suggest that the yo-yoing on the subway stuff in V---which I also suggest
is behind those scenes
of Anderson's in *The Master* where Phoenix has to go back and forth
yo-yo-like from wall to wall in Hoffman's house--
seems to have gone deep into Anderson's imagination.

Without seeing this yet, of course.

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 5:53 AM Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>