It’s Radiohead’s internet, we’re just living in it. There have been plenty of distractions from them in the months since In Rainbows — Radiohead.tv live broadcasts, YouTube videos of them covering Portishead in their living rooms, and an ongoing and spectacular contest with Aniboom for fan-made videos, many of which are well worthy of your procrastination time.
Now in their latest bid to take over every waking moment of our lives with their music and its ancillary products, they’ve made a video for “House of Cards” without using a camera —?sort of like how they made Kid A, an alt-rock album almost without using guitars. According to the Google website where it’s all hosted, two teams of scientists used revolving scanners and lasers to instantly create 3D models of their subjects — which for the purposes of the video, are a bunch of people at a party, a suburban neighbourhood, and Thom Yorke. Three guesses which one is the creepiest.

The resulting video seems almost low-tech and retro from the blue lighting and the way the images seem to pixelate (at one point, Yorke’s face is obscured by static induced during the shoot by putting a pane of glass between him and the lasers, which were confused by the reflections). The fact that everything disintegrates adds a morbid twist on the lyrics, which of course is so very Radiohead. Best of all is that, although tech geeks can download the data sets and play around with them, the rest of us can use the applet on the website to move the singing-Thom-virtual-object however we like. This mostly allows you to look directly up his pixel-nose, but at this stage, even digi-boogers seem exciting. We live in heady times. (http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/; www.aniboom.com/radiohead/)

MP3 OF THE WEEK
Flying Lotus, “Robo-Tussin feat. Lil Wayne”: Warp Records’ latest indie-hop wunderkind imagines a dizzy atmosphere for Weezy’s “A Milli” verses. As if Weezy didn’t sound high enough to start with. (http://tinyurl.com/5k2sdu)

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