In Rainbow Roads.
Radiohead are one of the great bands of our era and, depending on who you ask, In Rainbows is amongst their finest work. It’s especially memorable for appearing out of nowhere after the band had taken a hiatus of several years, and its innovative distribution: This was released as a pay-what-you-want download and, yes, you could give one of the world’s biggest bands $0 for their latest record if you wished.
Now the creator and composer On4Word has released a project called In Rainbow Roads (Youtube). It quite incredibly recreates the entire 43-minute album with the Super Mario 64 soundfont (a soundfont is essentially all the files used to create a given soundtrack), and I can only speculate at the amount of time that’s gone into this. The creator merely says it is “dedicated to all toadstool beings”, a riff on the lyrics from one of the album’s best tracks, Reckoner: “dedicated to all hu… all human beings”.
In fact it’s so good it’s received the ultimate badge of approval: Radiohead composer and guitarist Jonny Greenwood made a Mario joke and linked to it:
It’s a-me, Arpeggio!(h/t @boingboing)https://t.co/SwWBrjOPlsJanuary 24, 2023
This is far from Radiohead’s first brush with gaming: One of the band’s most recent projects was an Epic Games exclusive called Kid A Mnesiac, a weird mix of exhibition and what Thom Yorke called “mutant re-engineering” of earlier work. On4Word has also done other individual Radiohead songs (including No Surprises and Paranoid Android), as well as some excellent versions of Aphex Twin tracks.
If you’ve heard In Rainbows you’ve got to give this a listen, because it is kind of bonkers how well these two disparate soundscapes mesh-together. The care and attention given to the smallest detail in the songs, and finding some sort of Mushroom Kingdom equivalent, is extraordinary. And it all results in something that, while on the face of it absurd, can be almost eerily beautiful.
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