I T'S ABOUT THE THINGS YOU FORGET...

A ND REMEMBERING.

A mnesiac is the return of things once forgotten but aways present, and how they come back to us and will aways do.

T his album is connected to K id A in many ways. T he first and more obvious one is that they were recorded together, in the same studio sessions. T he release dates, recording sessions and the way they were designed suggests an unity. T he hidden booklet that comes with Kid A shows parts of lyrics from both albums. T he live album "i might be wrong" seems to connect them as well. T he song 'the morning bell' " returns " on A mnesiac, which seems to be the return of Kid A .

"if you look at the artwork for Kid A... well, that's like looking at the fire from afar. 'Amnesiac' is the sound of what it feels like to be standing in the fire." a nd on another ocasion: "The artwork for Kid A was really deliberately cold, because we wanted to project distance - as if someone was saying, I don't want to get involved in this. With Amnesiac, our first plan for the art work was to look for old, battered, worn-out books."

M uch thought was given into them. T hey are thematic albums, and one extends the ideas from the other. Kid A is looking at us from the outside... A mnesiac on the other hand is a more personal look upon people, having secrets, dreams and memories (forgotten ones?). A nd again, the way how the world turns around us is exposed, but from a different perspective. I n the words of colin greenwood:

"so Kid A had this distance from people... is about that wide-angle perspective, like a message on the answer-phone, but Amnesiac is all about the details and actually having a conversation with someone."

T he pyramid song cds 1 & 2 cover images shows an old tree which branches were cut off, leaving just it's ancient trunk lying there. B ut the tree is not dead. A lthough people thought it was gone and forgot about, it is still alive inside. and it will eventually bloom again someday... S omeone will notice it's return when least expected . I t was never gone.

T he inversion of colors used on these images is very interesting. S taying the same and yet changing makes me think that things come back in different forms, but always do. T he opposites are often used as a simbol of complementation, the different sides of something , and sometimes contradiction and irony .

O nce again radiohead released video blips, but this time they could only be found on the internet. Y ou could find the blips and a web-only video clip of "i might be wrong" in the official website, but now the website has changed. You can see them here

R adiohead's artwork is very important for a general look upon the album. T he limited edition of A mnesiac has some cool things not present in the normal one. I t looks like a book owned by a college library in "Catachresis College". C atachresis means applying a metaphorical term to a sentence due to the lack of a proper term. P erhaps this is how they want us to look at the album... u nderstand it through metaphors. T he account number in the part where the lending is noted is "Fheit 451", a reference to a book called " Fahrenheit 451 " by Ray Bradbury. T he book pictures a society in which all books are to be burned. I t's against the law to own or read books. T his is an attempt to make people plain, and end discussions between different points of views. I f you read the book you'll notice lot's of connections with Radiohead's philosophy, maybe one of the reasons why it is said "this book is to be hidden" on A mnesiac. B ooks are a way to remind us of things once forgotten... they are not the only way, but a good one. L ike A mnesiac, this book contains lots of references to literature. 4 51 is the temperature in which paper burns. A s for "Mithras Tauroctonos", written under the library's name, it's greek for "Mithras the Bull-slayer". Mithraism is an ancient persian cult first encountered by the Roman army in Persia (modern Iran) during the reign of emperor Nero. B ut it is much more ancient than that. M ithras is a god. I t is told that he captured the primaeval bull and, after dragging it back to his cave, killed the animal. F rom the bull's body grew useful plants and herbs, from its blood came the vine, and from its semen all useful animals.

I t reads on A mnesiac: "Labyrinthine structures are entered at the reader's own risk" creating a parallel between A mnesiac and the mith of the labyrinth. A s if the book was a labyrinth. T here is a blip as well called " maze " that shows a labyrinth which walls are made from pages of the A mnesiac booklet.

T he mith of the labyrinth, the story of how Theseus killed the minotaur goes like this: K ing Minos of Crete asked Poseidon the lord of the seas for a bull and he would sacrifice it to him. H e wished to prove he received his kingdom from the gods, and that he would be granted whatever he asked for. Poseidon granted his wish, but Minos liked it so much he decided to sacrifice a different one instead. T he god then contrived that Minos' wife Pasiphae, should fall in love with the bull. F rom their love the minotaur was born. W hen Minos found out about the affair, he imprisioned the minotaur in the labyrinth built by the great Daedalus. M any youths were sent from Athens to be devoured by the minotaur because they were at war with Crete. Theseus, who was to become king of Athens, was sent to the minotaur as well, but Ariadne, the daughter of Minos fell in love with him and helped defeat the beast and escape the labyrinth. G o here for the full tale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur I f you noticed the image on the left is different from the booklet, it's because the limited edition images are slightly different from the ones in the normal version. T he image is the same, but with a different framing, size and elements. S ome images are only available in the lmt edt.

T he crying minotaur shown lots of times on A mnesiac is the minotaur from the labyrinth, and maybe the bull from m ithraism as well . M aybe the reason why he's crying is because since history repeats itself, and since he was killed by Theseus and M ithras in the legends (and legends are symbols of the truth), the bull will be r epeatedly killed. T his shows that all myths, legends, religions and cultures tend to show the same things, contain the same facts, but with a different perspective to them. O ne other way to look at it is that maybe he's crying because he can't deny his own nature. H e can't stop killing all those people. H e must face who he is.

A nother reference present on A mnesiac is the work of the italian draftsman Giovanni Battista Piranesi. H is drawings are very similar to some of the art from A mnesiac. T his is one of his drawings:

O ne of his most important series is called "Imaginary Prisons". T he old radiohead.com had a section by that name, and a video blip called "piranesi". T hat part of the website contained lots of loose text and images. The texts were parts of song lyrics, random text and references to literature, like the german writer Herman Hesse and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. Check it out here: Imaginary Prisons P iranesi's prisons suggest the labyrinth in this specific context. T hey are great, and we are very small next to it... we could easily get lost wandering through it.

C heck out an image from the limited edition book and this image for more examples of the A mnesiac art I mentioned (like the one on the left).