Rayhan Hasan / blog

Paul Lansky and Idioteque

I was browsing around the internet last night and I found out that Radiohead’s “Idioteque” uses a sample from Paul Lansky’s “mild und leise”.

Lansky wrote mild und leise in 1974, entered it in an electronic music competition, was chosen as one of the winners, and was included on an album featuring the winners of the competition called “Electronic Music Winners”. Jonny Greenwood found the record 25 years later and lifted a sample from it.

Listen to our beloved Idioteque (the sampled chords happen at 0:13):

And then listen to part of mild und leise that was used in Idioteque

You can read Paul Lansky’s take on it here. Here’s a snippet:

What’s especially cute, and also occured to Jonny Greenwood, is that I was about his current age, when I wrote the piece—sort of a musical time warp.

Also, I found a copy of “Electronic Music Winners”. It was ripped from vinyl by muse1453, who also transcribed the liner notes. They include a short bit of text from Lansky and a poem (kind of). Read:

mild und leise was written and synthesized during 1973-74 using the IBM 360/91 computer at Princeton University and the Music 360 synthesis program written by Barry Vercoe. I want to thank my former student Richard Cann, composer of Bonnylee, for his help in learning how to use this program, and the Princeton University Computer Center for its generous allocation of computer time. This work is dedicated to Godfrey Winham.

  I would like to advise the listener to:

      listen easily and slowly — this
             work takes its time,
      listen to changing timbres,
             to changing chords,
             to changing timbres with-
                in chords,
             to changing chords within
                timbres,
      listen to repetition,
             to changes within
                repetition,
             to increasingly more com-
                plex forms of the same
                music under repetition,
      listen to different ways of doing
                things,
             to linear shapes,
             to repeated chords,
               — spreading out, and
               contracting, registrally,
             to simple rhythms,
               — becoming complex
               rhythms,
      listen to combinations of different
               ways of doing things,
      listen to starts and stops as
                breathing points and
                places where new twists
                begin an old material,
      listen to each part of the piece as
                an evolving, growing,
                and, more complicated
                form of earlier parts
                of the piece,
               — as a new way of doing
                things which has only
                gradually become
                possible.
      listen carefully, and easily.

                       - Paul Lansky