Radiohead’s Coachella Art Debut
Radiohead’s 'KID A MNESIA' is premiering as a large audiovisual installation at Coachella rather than a secret live set, and organizers say the 'bunker' installation will then tour to four cities as a standalone experience. The festival itself runs April 10 and 17, features headliners like Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G, and will livestream seven stages (including some in 4K) for at‑home viewers. (stereogum.com) (variety.com) (consequence.net)
People spent weeks wondering whether Radiohead might be the festival’s secret set, and the answer turned out to be stranger: they’re showing up at Coachella as an underground art installation instead of a concert. “Motion Picture House featuring KID A MNESIA” opens on Friday, April 10, inside a new bunker space at the festival in Indio, California. (variety.com) This is not a band-onstage setup with amplifiers and a surprise encore. Variety reported that Radiohead will not perform at the installation, which is built around a film and gallery experience drawn from the band’s Kid A and Amnesiac era. (variety.com) The project started life in 2021 as KID A MNESIA Exhibition, a downloadable virtual work for personal computer, Mac, and PlayStation 5. The new version turns that screen-based world into a physical space you can walk into, which is what the band says the idea was supposed to be before the pandemic pushed it online. (variety.com) The raw material comes from two Radiohead albums released a year apart: Kid A in 2000 and Amnesiac in 2001. The installation uses artwork made by Thom Yorke and longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood during that period, then pairs it with sound built from the original multitrack recordings, which are the separate studio layers used to assemble a finished song. (variety.com) At Coachella, the whole thing is being staged in what reports describe as a bunker, which gives the project a more fitting home than an ordinary white-wall gallery. JamBase said the festival structure is a 17,000-square-foot subterranean space beneath the grounds, and Consequence described the debut as taking place in a new underground bunker on April 10. (jambands.com) (consequence.net) After both Coachella weekends, the bunker does not disappear with the ferris wheel and food stalls. The installation is scheduled to reappear in four cities: 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. (variety.com) Those city runs are being sold more like museum entries than rock tickets. Variety says visitors will book two-hour slots from Thursday through Sunday, with about 75 minutes for the audiovisual piece and the rest for galleries and the surrounding installation space. (variety.com) That makes this one of the more Coachella things Coachella has done in years: take a rumor about a giant band and convert it into a premium art object inside the festival grounds. Coachella 2026 begins Friday, April 10, returns for a second weekend on April 17, and the lineup includes Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G at the top of the bill rather than Radiohead. (consequence.net) If you are not in the desert, the festival is still pushing a very wide at-home version. YouTube and Coachella are livestreaming all seven stages starting at 4 p.m. Pacific time on April 10, and the Coachella Stage, Outdoor Theatre, and Sahara streams will be available in 4K resolution. (blog.google) (consequence.net) So the surprise was real, just not in the old festival sense of “unannounced band in a tent.” Radiohead used one of the biggest music weekends in North America to launch a 75-minute walk-through film, then turned that launch into a touring installation that will keep moving long after the festival ends. (variety.com)
