Further details of Radiohead’s time spent working on recent album A Moon Shaped Pool have emerged via a piece for The Times Literary Supplement in which writer Adam Thorpe visited the band in the studio while they worked on the album.
Having been invited to a studio outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by the band’s Colin Greenwood, Thorpe recounts a tour of the studios which took in a music library holding the biggest vinyl collection in the world as well as a “grain storehouse now full of dusty film canisters and boxes containing unplayable digital tapes.”
Describing the studio as strange, hints to the final album become quickly apparent. “A whiteboard shows only a list of tracks in black marker pen, starting with ‘Daydreaming’ and ending with ‘Burn The Witch’. The rejected James Bond film tune, ‘Spectre’, floats in the middle, slightly separate.
Thorpe recounts some of the equipment present in the studio too. “Colin points to the main console, a vast sweep of knobs, buttons and faders. ‘This is a Neve 88 R, seventy-two channels, made in Burnley. Worth about a hundred thousand. It’s analog, like this reel-to-reel Studer, but we also use digital. It’s all about looping and layering.’
There’s also evidence that the band’s resident artist Stanley Donwood was involved immediately in the process with a number of canvases bearing his work all on display, Thorpe writing that he “reacts in acrylic to what he hears, the results to be modified and manipulated on computer for the LP’s cover.” You can read the whole piece, via TLS, here.
