| We knew what that was: jazz guitar.
Unmistakably so. The muted, even tone of the strings; the near-total
lack of attack. It was smooth and soft, and its chords were rich but
empty minor and minor-seventh affairs. They, too, had been subjected
to processing, not simple reverb or echo but some sort of filter that
set them at a distance from the listener, not only in presence but
in time. Just as we were righting ourselves and trying to calculate
our positions in relation to the sound, Thom Yorke started singing.
He sounded like he’d just been awakened from a thousand-year
sleep, or as if he expected to enter such a sleep if he could only
get these few troubled thoughts across beforehand. “Come on,
come on,” he sang, in a melody that first fell and then rose
like a dispirited human slide-whistle. “You think you drive me
crazy.” As he began, a third sound joined the heavily medicated
fray -- it might have been a second human voice, or two of them, or
it could have been a keyboard. “Wooo, wooo,” it said or
was forced to say. All of it seemed to come from a radio on the a
windowsill in a single-occupancy hotel room in Akron, Ohio, circa
1948, nothing going on in the city or anywhere else in the universe,
a total emptiness overtaking spaces that might once have held hope
or promise. “Come on, come on, you and the army,” Yorke
said; “You and your cronies.” Our stomachs began to turn.
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