Radiohead has been shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize, an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the United Kingdom or Ireland.
Along with Radiohead, 11 other artists were shortlisted:
Adele – ’19’
British Sea Power – ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’
Burial – ‘Untrue’
Elbow – ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’
Estelle – ‘Shine’
The Last Shadow Puppets – ‘The Age Of The Understatement’
Laura Marling – ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’
Neon Neon – ‘Stainless Style’
Portico Quartet – ‘Knee-Deep In The North Sea’
Robert Plant And Alison Krauss – ‘Raising Sand’
Radiohead – ‘In Rainbows’
Rachel Unthank And The Winterset – ‘The Bairns’
The winner will be announced on September 9 in London. This is the 4th nomination for Radiohead, though for some reason, they have never won the prize.
Basically it’s all about how I don’t like Radiohead, but how, through being interesting and innovative, they’ve made me like the ‘idea’ of Radiohead. Imagine if normal brands could do that. Make you care about products you don’t even like that much. I reckon there’s stuff we can learn from the ‘head.
Yes, we know it’s been out since earlier this week but we’ve been on vacation so cut us some slack.
For those that haven’t noticed, the video that used lasers instead of cameras to make has finally been released. We’ve been talking about it for months and the hype has certainly held up to the amazing-ness of the final product. What makes this video really interesteding is that you can download the raw 3D data and do pretty much whatever you want to with it. The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license?s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)
An interview with director James Frost can be read at Creativity Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Creativity: How did you come to the idea of using this sort of imaging? JF: About a year and a half ago I came across Flight Patterns, a piece of work done by Aaron Koblin—he’s basically a data visualizer. I’m kind of frightened by flying, I’m always obsessed by things that have planes and stuff, so I emailed him and said that I thought it was a really beautiful piece of work. He responded and we had lunch. At the time he had just left UCLA Media Lab, and he was going through all the stuff they were researching and developing. One of the things he had mentioned was they were working on real time 3D laser scanning. I immediately said Well, hang on a minute, what’s all that about? I wanted to get to the crux of it — is it really real time? He said that at that point they were pretty close to having it.
So, basically, I wrote up an idea. I’d known Radiohead’s managers for a while, and figured that they’d probably be the only band that would take that kind of a risk, so I sent it to them in November or December and they showed it to Thom.Thom is obviously very intelligent and keeps up with technological advances, and he came back and said he wanted to know more about it. At that point he sent me an email saying what was in his head before the video. There were two things he had very strong feelings about– one was vaporization and the other was a party scene. We went back and forth over email to try and decipher some sort of linear narrative to convey everything. I happened to be in England in April, so I went up to Oxford, met with him and talked for a couple of hours about stuff and then went, Let’s try it and see what happens.
We were sent a clip from an upcoming documentary about the Oxford music scene called “Local Support.” Jon Spira, the creator of the documentary, explains the clip:
I’m currently in post production on a feature length documentary I’m making about the history of the Oxford music scene. Obviously Radiohead feature quite prominently in it and have been very supportive, I’ve interviewed Ed, Colin and their manager Chris Hufford at length about their early days. I’ve put an interesting outtake up on youtube from my interview with Nigel Powell.
Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know, the film will talk about the band’s origins in their own words and those of their friends/contemporaries. If all things go to plan, there should be some mouthwatering unseen archival footage too.
Pitchfork has an update on the upcoming “House of Cards” video which we reported about a couple of times before. It was apparently supposed to be released today but has been pushed back. Bummer.
In case you’re just learning of it, the video was shot without any cameras. Instead, a whole bunch of lasers were used.
The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots.
In addition, Pitchfork also reports that “Radiohead will be sharing data used in the creation of their new video with fans, so that fans can do their own crazy, rave-y things with it. And good news for folks who think Velodyne Lidar sounds like a character in a fantasy novel: a documentary will soon surface showing just how all this fancy stuff was done.”