Radiohead’s bunker at Coachella
Radiohead has debuted a large film‑and‑art installation under the Coachella polo fields — a 17,000‑square‑foot bunker that turns the festival into a subterranean art venue as well as a music event. It’s a must‑see if you care about festival art because the scale and cinematic ambition make it a festival highlight distinct from normal stage programming. (musically.com)
Coachella opens on Friday, April 10, and one of the biggest new attractions is not a stage at all but a buried structure under the Empire Polo Fields where Radiohead is premiering a 75-minute film-and-art piece called “Motion Picture House: KID A MNESIA.” The space is a 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings, and all Coachella ticket holders can enter it. (usatoday.com) (variety.com) The project is built from artwork Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made while Radiohead were creating “Kid A” in 2000 and “Amnesiac” in 2001. Instead of hanging those sketches and paintings on walls like a normal exhibition, the band turned them into a large-format audiovisual work with a soundtrack remixed from the original multitrack recordings. (nme.com) (variety.com) This is not the first version of “KID A MNESIA.” Radiohead first released it in 2021 as a virtual exhibition on the Epic Games Store and PlayStation 5 after the pandemic pushed the idea out of physical space and into a digital one. (variety.com) (musically.com) The new version is the physical build the band originally wanted, and Coachella is where they are finally testing it at full scale. The installation uses a custom-built six-point surround sound system, which means the music is mixed to move around the room instead of just blasting from one direction like a normal festival screen. (variety.com) (nme.com) Yorke described the piece as a story in which “a monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten.” That gives the bunker a job beyond showing a film: it becomes the abandoned building inside the work, not just the box that contains it. (variety.com) (nme.com) Radiohead are not performing these dates as a band. The attraction is the installation itself, plus gallery areas with full-scale Yorke and Donwood artwork from the “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” era. (variety.com) After Coachella, the bunker version turns into a traveling exhibition with fixed runs in four cities: Brooklyn from May 6 to May 31 at the Agger Fish Building, Chicago from July 30 to August 23 at Cinespace Studio, Mexico City from October 27 to November 15 at La Maravilla Studios, and San Francisco from January 14 to February 7 at the Palace of Fine Arts. Each visit is sold in two-hour slots, with 75 minutes for the film and the remaining time for the gallery space. (variety.com) (nme.com) That makes this one of the stranger Coachella bookings in years: a festival best known for outdoor stages has added an underground room designed for a single band’s visual world. Radiohead are using the same weekend as the pop stars and headliners, but they are doing it with a bunker, a museum-scale build, and two albums that came out 25 and 24 years ago. (musically.com) (variety.com)
