Neo wakes up in the machine fields and is flushed down the drain to die. The song builds to crescendo and distortion takes over. He looks over to the fractured mirror to see his reflection and he becomes consumed by it. “You’re living in a fantasy world.” Neo is about to wake up from the Matrix. “Trap doors that open, I spiral down.” Neo takes the red pill. Thom sings,” I’d really, really like to help you man.” as Morpheus lifts the veil from Neo’s eyes. The song builds in percussion as they ascend the stairs to meet Morpheus for the first time. Then they suck out the thing that was in his bellybutton and he reveals that he didn’t think it was real. Optimistic begins as Neo makes the decision to stay in the car after having a gun pointed at him. On-screen is a downpour of rain on a lonely city street as Neo gets into a car. Treefingers chimes its way into my ears and it is like the music they play at spas. He wakes up in his bed thinking that maybe it was all just a crazy dream, until he gets a phone call from Trinity to meet up. In the interrogation room they close in on him once more, and his mouth disappears before they put a grotesque-looking tracker in his belly button. But he refuses to leave the building by going out on the window ledge and he is captured by the agents. Neo begins to panic as the agents descend upon him while Thom croons sweetly, “I’m not here this isn’t happening.” Neo is in the Matrix, and the Matrix isn’t real. Neo is at his office job the next day when Morpheus calls him, and the song How to Disappear Completely begins to play it is a soft and calming guitar strum. He meets Trinity in the club as a cacophony of trumpets begins to play and Thom says, “Everyone around here is so near.” The National Anthem starts with a heavy baseline as Neo’s journey into the unknown begins. ![]() Then he follows the white rabbit to the freaky underground club, and the song expresses the movement of the action. ![]() The music stops as Neo wakes up and sees Trinity’s message on his computer screen. An interesting facet of Smith’s character is that he doesn’t exist in the real world, he only truly exists as part of a sentinel program within the Matrix, and yet his character development is real. The juxtaposition of Smith overlaid with Thom’s distorted voice makes him look monstrous. Soft electronic beats match up with gunshots so that the stark vision of a shot is muffled by the soft electronic beat of the song.Īgent Smith speaking on-screen is heard through Thom’s distorted lyrics. Movement continues with Kid A as Trinity runs from the agents and they begin to shoot at her. Trinity is giving a slow motion kick to the chest of a police officer, which aligns with a slowing in the song Everything in Its Right Place to give the illusion of ultra-slow motion. The music of the album is responding to and informing the feel of the film it is an intuitive relationship. ![]() The pairing of Thom Yorke’s voice with the aesthetic of The Matrix produce an inescapable hollow feeling. Then I set up my iPhone with the album on a separate speaker and pressed play just before the Warner Brothers logo appeared. To begin, I inserted the DVD into the player, pressed play, and turned the volume down to zero. My goal here is to break down, song by song, Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) when “synched” with The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999).
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