As I travel down the lonely and tattered hallways of the never-ending building, phrases from lyrics and promotional posters jump out at me. The lyrics on ‘Kid A’ reflect mistrust of power and feeling at odds with the world, and these themes are splattered all over the exhibition. After melting inside its walls, the throbbing bassline of ‘ The National Anthem’ bursts in right on cue. Then, after entering a room filled with TVs flashing apocalyptic imagery, an arrow on the floor promises ‘DRUM N BASS’ inside a golden column in the middle of the room. When instantly recognisable full portions of songs are used, they’re done so in all the right places: the thudding rush of ‘Kid A’ opener ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ accompanies my first foray down a neon-lit pathway with Radiohead artwork dashing up and down the walls at the speed of light. While travelling through the exhibition feels like crawling inside one of Donwood’s stunning pieces of art, through your headphones you get to interrogate the nuts and bolts of the music itself, deconstructing albums you’ve lived with for 20 years, but are suddenly hearing like never before. Suitably, the best bits of the exhibition are also when images distort themselves beyond recognition in a way only achievable through a screen.Įvery sound heard in the game also appears on ‘Kid A’ or ‘Amnesiac’, but its parts are scattered like shards and stretched apart into new shapes as the music shows itself in dismembered forms. The genius of ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’ was in their warping of time and space, and their ability to remove you from the real world. When travelling through the surreal landscapes of the virtual exhibition, it proves a blessing that it ended up this way. KID A MNESIA was originally conceived as a physical installation, before obstacles including the pandemic got in its way, and it moved online. It was, and still is, viewed as a turning point not only for the band – who were, until that point, a largely formulaic if brilliant rock band – but for the direction of popular music at the start of the 2000s. It’s suitable, really, as ‘Kid A’, Radiohead’s fourth album that dropped at the turn of the millennium, was as far from traditional as they come, as they ditched the guitars for bleeping electronics and swirling soundscapes. READ MORE: Radiohead – ‘Kid Amnesiae’ review: a haunting secret history of two classic records.Created as part of a series of 20th anniversary celebrations for the band’s two game-changing albums from the early 2000s, ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’, they say that the exhibition will resonate with fans of the albums, and anyone “who understands this isn’t intended to be a traditional video game experience.” The original multitrack recordings of Kid A and Amnesiac are scattered and reformed in a series of impossible or possible spaces populated by equally impossible or possible creatures, surrounded by the art of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, created as the millennium loomed.“This is not a game,” Epic Games are at pains to point out at the start of a statement accompanying their new KID A MNESIA exhibition with Radiohead. Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke’s twisted anxious artwork and writing made to accompany the music of Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac is uncovered and brought back to life, in a building hidden in a forest made in pencil, stretching the idea of what an exhibition is to breaking point. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION is a fevered dream-space, an edifice, built from the art and creatures, words and recordings of Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac uncovered from 20 odd years ago, reassembled and given new mutant life. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION is a first-person exploration video game developed by and Arbitrarily Good Productions, and published by Epic Games Publishing.
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