Thom Yorke unveils surprise new album
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Radiohead perform at Rod Laver Picture: Norm Oorloff
Source: HWT Image Library
RADIOHEAD frontman Thom Yorke has released a surprise solo album, downloadable via peer-to-peer filesharing.
‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’, featuring eight tracks and a video, can be purchased from BitTorrent at the pay-gated cost of US$ 6 ($ 6.80) in an test by the musician and his sometime collaborator, producer Nigel Godrich, of whether it is possible to seize control of file sharing for creators.
"It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around," they said in a joint statement. "If it works well, it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work, enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves [and] bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers.
"If it works, anyone can do this exactly as we have done," added Yorke and Godrich. "The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey. It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front. The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network."
The white album … Thom Yorke posted a mysterious photo of a white record to social media earlier this week. Picture: Tumblr
Source: Supplied
In 2007, Yorke’s band Radiohead made In Rainbows available via a pay-what-you-want model.
A video for the first track from Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes – A Brain In A Bottle – is available for free and a link to buy the record on vinyl is also included.
The white vinyl album is "printed with a metallic silver laminate then multi-tone black and a striking neon green; the whole is enclosed in a bespoke anti-static shield bag – a metallised laminated material usually used by the electronics industry for protecting components from electrostatic interference. The bag is printed with neon green on both sides, and has a resealable grip closure."
Yorke posted a mysterious photo of the album to social media earlier this week.
His last solo album was 2006’s The Eraser.
