Covering Thom Yorke’s ‘Cymbal Rush’

The newest addition to my fortnightly videos is now online:

It’s a VideoSong, but recorded the way I perform my own songs live. It might actually be a new format?! So let’s call it a LiveLoopVideoSong following three simple rules:

1. What you see is what you hear. (No lip-syncing for instruments or voice)
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it. (No hidden sounds)
3. It’s all done live in one continuous recording.

It’s done in Ableton Live, recorded all the way through in one go. Since I wanted to shoot from different angles and did the camerawork myself, the recording was 30+ minutes long which I needed to edit down to not bore everyone to death.

I got the idea to cover ‘Cymbal Rush’ when I last saw Radiohead play it live in Berlin in 2008. Thom Yorke’s ‘Eraser’ was on heavy rotation for a long time after it came out and to this day it’s one of my favourite albums. It only took me close to four years to actually get around to covering it. It’s neither based solely on the live nor on the album version, but is a mix of both.

The recording itself didn’t take long, but I had some serious technical difficulties which took me 1,5 days to sort out. Ultimately I’ll have to reformat my MacBook Pro and do a fresh install of the OS to avoid it in the future.

Because of the unforeseen difficulties with the last two videos I’ve decided to move the release day to Monday from now on. This way, if I run into any issues I still have two extra days to get everything done in time. This means, the next video will be up on June 11. This time it’ll be a vblog as the next two weeks I’ll fully concentrate on finishing the first 8 songs for the next album.

I hope you enjoy the video! If you have comments or questions, please let me know. I’d be happy to read and answer them.

x,
Mads