Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead and The Smile's resident musical polymath, has been detailing another current project and preoccupation - touring Italy, documenting and playing historic church organs.
On his own Grand Tour, Greenwood inspected and played multiple pre-modern instruments, and found them to be inspiringly various in approach and features. “Just looking around those Italian churches," he told The Guardian, "you saw organs that summon up remarkable histories.
"One church in Comunanza, near the Sibillini mountains, has an organ with a little water tank that enables the organist to make this burbling noise that imitates birdsong. There was another church where Mozart is supposed to have visited and played the organ, so we were all rubbing the keys excitedly!
Hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound
Jonny Greenwood
"Every church organ on Earth will have years of history embedded in it.”
“I was able to actually play some of these amazing medieval instruments. The internal parts – what they call the brain – are incredibly complex pieces of technology.
"These huge machines, created centuries ago, were tackling the same challenges of synthesis and sampling and sound reproduction that we struggle with today.”
Now, Greenwood's organ odyssey has inspired an eight-hour, drone-dominated ambient score that's receiving its debut in the UK next week. The Norfolk & Norwich festival will host a performance of the piece, called 268 Years of Reverb, by two organists playing in shifts.
The name of the piece at any given recital is actually dictated by the age of the church in which it's performed, in this case, Norwich's Octagon Chapel. “The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed," he told the festival website.
"In an old church, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound."
Of course, that's only one strand of Greenwood's restless musical, performance and production thinking. In less esoteric mode, he also says “I think a lot about that Sex Pistols album, Never Mind the Bollocks. How carefully it was recorded, how precisely it was arranged. {Producer] Chris Thomas was obsessed with placing mics in the right place, recording cleanly, and getting the band constantly to keep their instruments in tune."
It's a sentiment we feel the sadly departed Steve Albini might agree with: "Even something that is supposed to be the embodiment of heads-down rock’n’roll is actually something incredibly precise.”
Back in the mainstream, Greenwood also gave a brief status update on the activities of Radiohead's ever-busy diaspora. "he Smile are on tour, Ed is making another solo record, Colin is playing bass with Nick Cave... so lots of music is being made, just not as Radiohead.
"We’re still talking all the time, we just need to make a plan and get some time together sorted out in advance. I’ve never been very good at that.
"Too busy dicking around in this studio.”
We empathise.
For more information on 268 Years of Reverb, see The Norfolk & Norwich festival.
