With the progressive disappearance of W.A.S.T.E, DEAD AIR SPACE, the erasure of tweets, posts, videos, photographs from the band’s social media accounts, including profile and cover pictures, Radiohead helped solidify the buildup surrounding their ninth studio album, suggesting that through A Moon Shaped Pool’s recording (a stop & go effort spanning two years of “working in limits,” repairing tired tracks through, as Jonny Greenwood cryptically put, the pairing of “very old and very new technology,”) they had found yet another way to shift shape, perhaps rescale the topography of music’s digitized circuitry. While their lesson stopped short of how to disappear completely, the performance piece certainly evoked the cleaning of a slate, adding gravity to the initial pun of New Dawn Chorus LLP–the record company created months before the digital version of the album’s May 8th release. More or less, Yorke and company were announcing that A.M.S.P would pour wax over the idea that, after 30 years of defying caricature and habituation, they had finally cooled off, run out of luck; exhausted all options, channels, mediums which might yield yet another metamorphosis. Especially with a modest portion of the album rumored to comprise recycled tracks that, even if based upon their most recent performances, wouldn’t stand alone, let alone surpass (and then only mirror) the level of invention and influence still hailing from their release of Kid A | Amnesiac, In Rainbows just to name a few. But clearly there had to be some substance behind the calculated gesture, which implied, even after A.M.S.P’s mp3 release, that something remained buried beneath the surface. Like many W.A.S.T.E followers not immediately blown away with the digitized version, I pre-ordered the vinyl unable to refrain from the hope that–somewhere within the grooves of the dated medium–there was something like Maxwell’s Demon at play, still luring. That after the band’s many demurs, a pattern was beginning to emerge–something to do with the mail and how the sound would be delivered.
Before furrowing into the viability of anything singular lurking within the vinyl’s long-playing format, we should attend to W.A.S.T.E–Radiohead’s official website and online store. While admittingly insular, the shadowy acronym, We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire– was first coined by Thomas Pynchon with the publication of his first and only novella, The Crying of Lot 49. The puzzling cipher signifies the distorting counterforce of Trystero–a postal medium that, not lacking clairvoyance, weighs upon the significance of how information is delivered. In this context, Pynchon foresees how the increasing digitization of communication will corrode context and ultimately determine identity itself. Like the many demurs leading to A.M.S.P’s vinyl shipment–the most glaring being Radiohead’s mailing of leaflets to fans who had previously preordered albums through W.A.S.T.E’s website–the original cipher keeps resurfacing through the text–on postage stamps, suburban sidewalks, bathroom stalls, a Victorian signet ring–to keep Oeidipa Maas ultimately lost as she turns through the circuitry of The Crying of Lot 49’s cybernetic moor. Seen in this light, Lot 49’s novel within a novel delivers a respectable framework for why Radiohead would bother with the trouble of engineering something as harrowing as an album within an album. Distributed through such an outdated and therefore decentralized medium, the band would be creating (yet once again) an unfounded experience. Most significant, disseminated specifically through this dated context, the release of the vinyl would generate a singular demand for a sense of texture that centralized, digital formats simply cannot afford. Since the expiration of the band’s contract with EMI, Radiohead has continued to explore formats and methods of distribution to ultimately destabilize the centralized forces that dictate how music is disseminated. While this campaign has mainly focused upon generating exposure to various file-sharing platforms, encouraging other artists to distribute and therefore rightfully pocket digital sales, there is no reason why they would not shift their efforts to a far more decentralized format. What’s more, the band’s seeming departure from this previous standard (allowing A.M.S.P’s digitally to be purchased through i-tunes & amazon) only adds to the delusion that something metaphysical would in fact manifest through the standard service of the mail.
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