Exploring forms of expression beyond his Radiohead roots, Thom Yorke launched his third solo album entitled ANIMA last June. Anticipation for his new album built as vast projections appeared on London landmarks earlier last month reading “Do you have trouble remembering your dreams?” This was coupled with a strange advertisement that appeared inside the London Tube for a company named ANIMA Technologies. The company reported to have built something called a ‘Dream Camera’, a device that’s capable of capturing our sleeping world. The ad went on to promise “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your dreams back.”
The world of dreams
Only in the mind of Thom Yorke would such a cryptic yet eerily familiar advertisement have been conceived. It’s common knowledge that Yorke has been obsessed with dreams, what with previous tracks like “Daydreaming” and dreamy compositions for the film Suspiria. ANIMA is meant to expound on the theme and how it interacts with the loneliness of our waking world. In an interview, Yorke talked about the meaning behind the title: “The reason it ended up being called ANIMA was partly because I’m obsessed with this whole dream thing. It comes from this concept that (psychologist) Jung had.” ANIMA in Jungian theory is our inner feminine spirit that manifests itself in our dreams. True enough, listening to the album’s ‘stream-of-consciousness’ lyrics feels like reading out late night scribblings in Yorke’s dream journal.
Articulating through electronics
Yorke has been dabbling with electronics for two decades now, but it’s this album that proves how he has fully grown into the medium as a solo artist. Spin describes ANIMA as “Yorke’s most holistic engagement yet with the aesthetics of club music conveying its sentiments chiefly via unrelenting rhythm and overwhelming bodily sensation.” ANIMA is his best attempt at conveying the profound loneliness of the internet era not just through lyrics but through sound.
Yorke has described the album as an extended period of anxiety, and the synth-laden and techno-inflected tracks definitely sound like it. Full of ghostlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses, each track is filled with moody and menacing electronic abstractions that pick apart your soul. The album begins with the upbeat ‘Traffic’ which draws from anti-consumerist sentiments of previous songs like “Paranoid Android”. Yorke uses mechanical hums and looped drumbeats paired with lyrics “Show me the money/Party with a rich zombie” to depict the frenzied state of current consumerist culture. As the album goes on, tracks like the highly anticipated ‘Dawn Chorus’ delve into themes of memory and loss.
A history with the experimental music
While the album does a good job of showcasing Thom Yorke’s experimental side, this is nothing new for the artist. It’s a style he’s been evolving since Radiohead’s first albums. In fact, Radiohead has always been known for experimenting with sounds, even when it came to guitar pedals with Pitchfork noting how the band would often fiddle with the knobs of their DL4 to test out different sounds. The Line 6 DL4 became a key contributor to the unique sound of Radiohead. The tool was able to provide the band a wide array of tones, that “[ranged] from a tube driven, tape loop echo (complete with adjustable wow and flutter), through 24 bit squeaky clean digital echo, to real-time reverse delay”. The most important guitar pedal of the last 20 years became famous for the boundless potential it provides musicians. Radiohead used tools like these extensively to push their music further, which Thom Yorke brings with him in his career as a solo artist. Through ANIMA, Yorke has finally reaped the rewards of decades worth of dabbling with experimental music.