speaking of radiohead...

Reading Graham's behind the scenes with Radiohead blog got me to thinking about the story behind the recording of their song "idioteque," off of Kid A.

I always loved that song, built around that very odd synth riff, which i assumed was done by jonny greenwood on his analogue systems rs 8000, or something equivalent. but the true story about where that sound came from is much much cooler. it was sampled from a computer music piece called 'mild und leise' written by composer Paul Lansky in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer. (trust me, you want to click that link and take a look.)

i could go into specifics, but you'll learn much more by following the link to paul lansky's site and having him tell you the story. it's fascinating the amount of work that went into composing electronic music in those days.

take a listen to the piece, mild und leise (mp3 file).

and once you've absorbed that, how about checking out what radiohead did with it, almost 20 years later: