Jonny Greenwood is making (sound)waves in the UK music scene. Just a month after The Smile released the new album Wall of Eyes, the multi-instrumentalist has announced a new project: an eight-hour organ composition titled “268 Years of Reverb.”
The sprawling, workday-length piece will be performed on May 18th by James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy at Norwich, UK’s Octagon Chapel as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival.
In a statement, Greenwood described his inspiration:
“The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed. In an old church, air is going through the same organ pipes, in the same space, that other listeners have experienced for centuries. So, hearing church organs is a kind of time travel, the closest we have to faithfully reproducing ancient sound. In the Octagon Chapel, it’s 268 years of time: season after season spent celebrating, commiserating, praising, mourning, to the same recorded sounds. This time is measured over generations, though the rituals of the church, and is a reminder that churches are the repository for the books of parish records as well as Bibles.
In writing this, I was influenced by the classical Indian approach to melodies, where new notes are introduced very gradually into improvised solos—the arrival of each note is so long-awaited, that its arrival is a revelation of a new world. Knowing this introduces huge tension into the experience of listening to that music. Also, within the drone of the tanpura are the swirling overtones and harmonics that compound the complexity and beauty of the textures. It’s meditative, but not just meditative, because of this tension. Melodies in Indian music are often thought of as circular, rather than linear — you’re climbing on to a moving wheel, not starting and ending in silence.
This is why the first and last chords of X years of reverb incorporate notes below/above audible frequencies. In this way, the music passes across the room as it passes across the audible spectrum, in the same way a rainbow is only the narrow range of the visible spectrum amongst all possible frequencies of light.”
The Norfolk & Norwich Festival is selling tickets for the full performance or for segments of one hour and 50 minutes.
The English musician is best known for being Radiohead’s lead guitarist and keyboardist, but has been expanding his horizons in recent years. In addition to scoring films and writing arrangements, he’s been keeping busy with collabs like Jarak Qaribak. As Greenwood told us in June, “My adolescent fantasy came true: having instruments in a room and having an excuse to use them and play them.”
Fans of Greenwood can catch him onstage as part of The Smile’s UK/European tour. You can grab your seat here.