Thom Yorke Assignment

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LPS – Thom Yorke – Assignment 1 – Charles Vaughan

From the 29th to the 31st of October, I attended Pitchfork Music Festival in Paris, which on the Friday night Thom Yorke headlined with a live performance of his 2014 album ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’, as well as other works from Atom’s for Peace. Thom Yorke is predominantly known as the lead singer to the band Radiohead, the highly popular alternative band who were voted the “2nd best band of the 2000s” . This performance was of Thom Yorke’s second solo album, his first being ‘The Eraser’ (2006), and both were produced by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who also joined him on-stage for the performance.
Venue, Setup and Audience Pitchfork music festival takes place in the ‘Grand Halle de …show more content…

The use of the Traktor controllers and Traktor software allowed for free improvisation over the structure of each song, allowing them to loop sections freely and drop in elements from other parts of the song, or other tracks entirely. However, once the remix sets were configured, they couldn’t be changed mid-performance, or at least not with ease, so the performance elements they could draw from were pre-determined. The drum machine also allowed for some interesting improvisational elements as it allowed quick manipulation over the track drum patterns easily. Obviously Thom also freely improvised with his vocals, as well as improvising on the guitar, and this gave him the freedom to really perform the tracks with full enjoyment, without worrying about too many music systems …show more content…

Clearly Thom Yorke has become used to the freedom of performance he can obtain through Radiohead’s live shows, and I think he has tried to bring this freedom and energy to the live shows, this being achieved by stripping down the technology used to the basics. By minimalizing the stress of analogue systems and hugely complex sequencer based performances, Thom gained the freedom to dance and sing and bring energy onto stage, which I believe was responsible for the difference in sound between the record and live performance. This combined with the simplistic yet mesmerising visuals from Tarik Barri, created a performance which connected with the audience as a whole and effectively used the technology at hand in creating a memorable and enjoyable

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