Radiohead installation draws crowds
Festivalgoers spent time inside the 'Radiohead Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia' installation at Coachella, which surfaced as a named art experience during Weekend 1 coverage. (pressenterprise.com)
Coachella’s new underground bunker turned into a Radiohead destination this weekend, with festivalgoers filing into “Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia” during Weekend 1. (variety.com) The installation opened Friday, April 10, at the festival in Indio, California, and all Coachella ticket holders were eligible to enter. It was built inside a 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings beneath the Empire Polo Fields. (rollingstone.com) Inside, visitors get a 75-minute film and gallery experience built from artwork Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made during the sessions for Radiohead’s 2000 album “Kid A” and 2001 album “Amnesiac.” The soundtrack uses new mixes drawn from the original multitracks and played in six-point surround sound. (kida-mnesia.com) The project is not a Radiohead concert, and the band is not performing at the installation. Radiohead’s announcement instead framed it as a large-scale audiovisual house built to present “Kid A Mnesia” as a physical experience. (variety.com) That distinction matters at Coachella because the festival is mixing headline sets with destination art and film experiences, and this one was prominent enough to surface by name in Weekend 1 coverage. The Press-Enterprise’s April 11 festival report listed the “Radiohead Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia” as one of the attractions drawing people in. (pressenterprise.com) The installation also revives a project that first appeared in digital form in 2021, when “Kid A Mnesia” launched on the Epic Games Store and PlayStation 5 during the Covid-19 period. Radiohead said the new physical version is the original idea realized at full scale after the pandemic pushed the work into a virtual format. (rollingstone.com) After Coachella, “Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia” is scheduled to move to Brooklyn from May 6 to May 31, Chicago from July 30 to August 23, Mexico City from October 27 to November 15, and San Francisco from January 14 to February 7, 2027. Those stops will use two-hour timed entries, with 75 minutes for the film and the remaining time for the gallery. (kida-mnesia.com) So the crowds at Coachella were seeing the first public run of a touring Radiohead installation, not a one-weekend stunt. Weekend 2 now doubles as the project’s second festival showing before it leaves the desert for multiweek residencies. (variety.com)
