Pitchfork

Take that, conventional music video-making wisdom! Radiohead don't have time for your petty, archaic devices, such as, um, the camera. Indeed, they've gone and made a new music video for In Rainbows' woozy "House of Cards" that doesn't make use of a camera at all!

Nope, the "Cards" clip instead utilizes two state-of-the-art fancy-pants hyperoptic-mumbo-jumbo-something-or-other multimedia technologies known as Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar. Um, press release, a little help please?

Ah, here we go: "The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots." Well shucks, ain't that somethin'?

The James Frost-directed video hasn't gone live quite yet, but when it does, you'll find it by clicking here. Until then, feast your eyes on some more stills presumably from the clip that Radiohead posted on Dead Air Space late last month:











Thus spake Thom Yorke in the press release: "I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, the struggle to get your head round what you can do with it. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points-- and how strangely emotional it ended up being."

Finally, much like they butchered "Nude" into convenient little iTunes pieces for your remixing pleasure, Radiohead will be sharing data used in the creation of their new video with fans, so that fans can do their own crazy, rave-y things with it. And good news for folks who think Velodyne Lidar sounds like a character in a fantasy novel: a documentary will soon surface showing just how all this fancy stuff was done.

The "House of Cards" clip and the accompanying fun are due to hit Google later today (July 10). UPDATE: The video launch has been pushed back to a later date, it seems.