Nothing’s more exciting than a day in a studio with a string section – or more ruinously expensive. So it’s good to feed that habit away from the band, especially if it means more experience for the next Radiohead string day. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
It’s funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the ’60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it’s going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that’s what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That’s a very bizarre and modern thing. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds. If you’d asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produce everything I needed with live instrumentalists, so I don’t need electronics. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
There’s nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up. It’s like when you go to the cinema – the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in ’92 or ’93, I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, ‘Where is this all coming from?’ And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
Jamaican reggae is the style of music I always reach for when ranting to friends about how you could listen to one style of music exclusively for the rest of your life – and it would all be great and varied and worth hearing. Jonny Greenwood Read Quote
