Artist Watch: Radiohead

I'm sure it may seem a bit weird that a band with as much renown as Radiohead is appearing in a section primarily targeted at up-and-coming artists, but here's a bit interesting news that may make you want to keep a closer eye on them: a 'leaked' song for Radiohead's upcoming EP seems to have given way to an alternate reality game.

With a track entitled "These Are My Twisted Words," Thom Yorke and crew have created a very interesting way to market themselves by taking advantage of music pirating sites and Twitter in addition to their own site. Here are the particulars that make the song seem more than a simple leak:

-A few days ago, a new Radiohead track appeared on the music sharing site, what.cd. To listen to the track, click here. Packed in with the file posted was this text file.

-Some Internet super-sleuths suppose that the line mentioning "the wall of ice" is a reference to a particular xkcd comic (see the image above) due to its similarity to the band's own views regarding digital rights management.

-Also found in the text file is a date: 2009-08-17, which was proposed as the release date for the Wall of Ice EP. Obviously, this is not quite the case though, as it is beyond that date, and no further tracks have been found. Others supposed that the date is in reference to the date that EMI re-released Radiohead's back catalog in order to make a few quick bucks.

-Then, showing up on Radiohead's merchandise site is a picture of twisted trees that resemble design on the text file. This coincided with a post on radiohead.com that 'officially' released "These Are My Twisted Words." Inside the zip file for the song hosted on the band site, there's a mysterious PDF packed in that displays a series of images, including one of the twisted trees. Directions for these images read as follows: "This is an artwork to accompany the audio file. We suggest you print these images out on tracing paper. Use at least 80gsm tracing paper or your printer will eat it as we discovered. You could put them in any order that pleases you"

So what does it all mean? Well, we know the EP hasn't released on the day predicted, which has undoubtedly called much of this conjecture into questions. However, I think that the new result of typing http://wallofice.com/ into an address bar (it changed to its current form on August 17, mind you) is enough proof that this Wall of Ice EP isn't just a crazy Internet farce.