Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
O’Riley: Radiohead has, especially in the more Thom Yorke-primary pieces, shown a proclivity for deconstruction: Like “Spinning Plates,” on record an amalgam of reversed vocal recording spliced in with recordings of Yorke’s singing backward; in live performance, an ingenious piano/vocal piece (for which I get credit for unwarranted originality only by being super-fan familiar with the released live version on the EP, I Might Be Wrong).
More recently, one got a bigger does of this live/studio disconnect when Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, was released. To my ears, the album sounded like someone too enamoured of his laptop, while the live versions of The Eraser songs sounded like a songwriter at his creative peak.
I had a similar adverse reaction to Radiohead’s latest release, The King Of Limbs, even to the point of doubting the intrinsic worth, as songs, of so many of the Limbs works, so obscured and alienating did I find the production environments for each song, only to be happily thwarted by the extraordinary verve, mastery and sheer great songwriting in the subsequent live performances of Limbs material, on SNL, Colbert Report and here on the BBC, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich curated series, From The Basement. The performance of “Give Up The Ghost” inspired my own piano take on the piece, downloadable here.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cf3Hhj9JLc
