Radiohead recently released a remastered version of their incredible 1997 album, OK Computer, which contains a baffling easter egg.
The £100 ($167.30) release, OKNOTOK, contains three 12-inch records, a hardcover book with a ton of drawings, and a C90 cassette tape that plays a whole bunch of gibberish when you fire it up.
That garbled collection of noises is actually the sound of an 8-bit ZX Spectrum computer starting up, followed by a bunch of beeping. When played on the ancient computer, it actually shows a collection of colours and words that spell out a few different messages.
A YouTuber ran the data through an emulator of the machine and posted the results for all to see. It looks kooky as fuck but hey, that’s Radiohead for you. Suss it out below.
As the program boots up, it displays the message “Inside your home computer are… Thomas Yorke, Colin Greenwood, Jonathan Greenwood, Edward O’Brien, Philip Selway, Nigel Godrich, & Stanley Donwood.” A date is also displayed – December 1996 – a few months prior to the release of OK Computer.
It then spits out a bunch of colours and scrambled words to to the soothing sound of janky 8-bit beeping. It looks like nothing, but there’s a message hidden in the madness. An easter egg… Inside the easter egg.
“Congratulations….you’ve found the secret message syd lives hmmmm. We should get out more.” Yeah, you should.
Radiohead’s lead guitarist and keyboardist, Jonny Greenwood, bloody loves the weird old nerdy computer and actually used to own one. In a 2003 interview he said that using the machine to program music through coding gets you to “think in very pure terms about what sound is and what music is.”
It’s a cool little addition to an already fantastic album that hardcore fans will lap up like a thirsty dog. The remastered album is also available on Spotify and I highly recommend you give it a listen.
Source & Photo: YouTube / OooSLAJEREKooO.
