Exhibit A

Radiohead’s collaboration with Epic is a vivid experiment in interactive art

- 

Back in January 1999, Radiohead and producer Nigel Godrich walked into a Paris studio to begin recording a pair of albums that would set the band on a new, wildly different trajectory. Although both Kid A and Amnesiac have been widely reappraised since, this sudden shift from art-rock to electronica baffled legions of fans (and much of the music press) at the time. Now, this interactive exhibition has been built around a selection of songs from the 20th-anniversary rerelease of these albums. Yet Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is no hollow promotional exercise, but something far stranger and more interesting.

Three years before those early sessions, Peter Gabriel released Eve, an earnestly odd CD-ROM adventure featuring bizarre dreamscapes soundtracked by his own music, which the player could collect and remix. We’ve seen dozens of collaborations between musicians and videogames since, but Kid A Mnesia is perhaps the first that feels like it belongs to the same lineage. It’s effectively a virtual museum tour meets avant-garde walking simulator, with sequences that suggest Tetsuya Mizuguchi adapting the lightshow from a Radiohead concert (as well as one or two moments that suggest Jeff Minter was fighting him for the controls).

The experience is as fascinatingly inscrutable as many found the music at the time – but playful with it. The smart money was always on the sparse minimalism of Kid A opener Everything In Its Right Place to greet your arrival. But before then you find yourself in a stylised black-and-white forest (the restricted palette could be a reference to the “two colours in my head” to which singer Thom Yorke refers), reminiscent of both Jordan Thomas’s