Thom Yorke
Suspiria

“This is a waltz thinking of our bodies/ What they mean for our salvation/ With only the clothes we rise with/ Only the ground we stand on/ Is the darkness ours, there to take?/ Bathed in lightness, immersed in warmth/ All is well, as long as we keep spinning/ Here and now, dancing behind a wall” sings Thom Yorke in “Suspirium”, and his (few) words resonate clear, sweet, alarmed, and consoling inside the modern box of “Music from Suspiria”, released at the end of 2018.

A dark, skeletal, alien, nocturnal requiem, possibly inspired not only by Luca Guadagnino's film, which it scores, but also by the December 2016 death of Yorke's wife, Rachel Owen, mother of his two children. “Sabbath Incantation” is a choir for deconsecrated churches, carried by the tide (a spirit akin, more mature and desolate, to Alt-J’s “Pleader”). “Suspirium” is a dance, like “Unmade” and “Open Again”, to be danced in a hypothetical Ark at the edges of reality, where to save what is real, separate it from the sea of enchanting wrecks (already illustrated by Stanley Donwood in the artwork for Amok). "People have changed the way they think," stated Thom Yorke, "also because of the Internet and social networks. It is fascism, but not in the old sense. It’s not even real but no less dangerous for that: it's the new fascism, and people no longer feel responsible for their behavior." “The Conjuring of Anke”, with its piano and female voices chorus, traverses drained, abandoned, neo-classical territories, moving slowly and with simplicity, while tracks like “The Hooks”, “The Inevitable Pull” and “The Jumps” are electronic backdrops, sharp, gleaming on the dark bottom of things. Again, we are not too far from the debut of Alt-J's drummer, Thom Sonny Green (High Anxiety, 2016), as if only art and music were entrusted with the power to decide who is brother to whom, where home is. “The Universe Is Indifferent” is minimal blues, gritty, electric, spiritual, angelic with Yorke's voice, seeking new forms of salvation and purity.

Jaron Lanier (one of the pioneers of virtual reality, now very critical) says that people’s anger grows because through an algorithm it ends up in a hall of mirrors where opinions become increasingly extreme.

"The danger is not a stupid conservative government that will end up devouring itself. To return to Suspiria and the metaphor of dance: we are like the dancer who under a spell she does not understand throws herself this way and that - until she kills herself. That dancer is us who no longer have faith in our ability to change things, because we are living in a kind of desert," explained the Radiohead leader, increasingly in the role of a “new humanism” prophet. Stay Human, he suggests to us from Ok Computer, through Kid A to his latest works. And it has become a recurring voice, in many public gatherings in Italy, in Europe, I believe also in America. In the living rooms of many families, and in the dialogues we make or do not make with ourselves.

Ross Goodwin, “writer of writers” and creator of artificial intelligences (the latest, a Cadillac set up by storing poetry, science fiction, and pulp fiction, sensors and GPS navigator, capable of retracing Kerouac's journey in “On The Road” and making an account of it) explained that hallucination is also the term for the activity performed by a computer when generating content. At that moment it shows us a reality not naturally produced by our neurons but an altered, astonishing world.

Which we created to isolate ourselves, after two world wars. To be able to live in a dream (the first was Alan Touring). Baricco, in his latest “The Game”, reminds us it was, indeed, a dream and not a nightmare. But within this dream we stopped remembering. Alice, lost in increasingly less wonderful lands, can no longer awaken. Extreme rights return. Virtually everything is possible. Reality has already been dismembered, divided. The wars have already been fought. There have been winners and losers. Cages, courtyards, palaces, fake plastic trees and crystal empires have been built.

We will return to exist and breathe, the texts seem to suggest, open again/ On another shore/ Bathed by waves (“Open Again”). To feel certain of something and safe from something else, but truly, not because it was promised to us. A humanly and sentimentally clear, precise storm will arrive, which will tear down what needs to be torn down. (The mirrors and phones/ Had caught fire, caught fire […]And the water forgave us/ And/ the fascists felt shame/ Toward their puppet king/ Saying we will not make this mistake again, “Has Ended”). It will reward those who fought. Those who did not give up. Those who saved something. Those who sought new prayers to chase away old idols. Those who believed in the possibility of a narrow kingdom. It will restore an origin and a new spirit. And will finally give a port to our Arks, moored at the edges of reality like lanterns, like so many little eyes open on the planet, witnesses of the dialogue between earth and sky. Constellations open to the east to orient the sun toward the mountains, and which the mountains will return at sunset.