Tracklisting: 01 the eraser 02 analyse 03 the clock 04 black swan 05 skip divided 06 atoms for peace 07 and it rained all night 08 harrowdown hill 09 cymbal rush Catalogue numbers: CD: XLCD200 CD: WPCB-10001 (Japan) CD: HN346CD (Taiwan) 12" Vinyl: XLLP200

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

The Eraser is Thom Yorke's project. In May 2004, Jonny Greenwood already revealed that Thom was working on a solo album. It was only on May 13th 2006 when Thom announced this new album in an e-mail.

The album, released on July 10th 2006 through XL Recordings, features 9 tracks, all written and performed by Thom Yorke.

Longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich produced and arranged the tracks. Stanley Donwood is responsible for the album and website's artwork. For more information and newsletter subscriptions, check the official website at www.theeraser.net.

The album was followed by two singles ('Harrowdown Hill' & 'Analyse') and the Spitting Feathers EP. The latter was a Japan-only release, which featured the Harrowdown Hill video and the b-sides from the singles: 'The Drunkk Machine', 'A Rat's Nest', 'Jetstream', 'Harrowdown Hill' [Extended Mix] and 'Iluvya'.

'Harrowdown Hill' 7" Vinyl Limited to 5000 copies XL RECORDINGS: XLS238 1. Harrowdown Hill [Extended Mix] 2. Jetstream	'Harrowdown Hill' - 12" Vinyl Limited to 3000 copies XL RECORDINGS: XLT238 1. Harrowdown Hill 2. The Drunkk Machine	'Harrowdown Hill' - CD single Limited to 10.000 copies XL RECORDINGS: XLS238CD 1. Harrowdown Hill 2. The Drunkk Machine 3. Harrowdown Hill [Extended Mix]
'Analyse' - 12" Vinyl XL RECORDINGS: XLT252 1. Analyse 2. A Rat's Nest 3. Iluvya	'Spitting Feathers' Warner: WPCB-10015 1. The Drunkk Machine 2. A Rat's Nest 3. Jetstream 4. Harrowdown Hill [Extended Mix] 5. Iluvya 6. Harrowdown Hill - Video	'Black Swan' - Japanese Promo XL RECORDINGS: PCS-762 1. Black Swan

Thom Yorke's e-mail from May 13th:

this is just a note to say that something has been kicking around in the background that i have not told you about.
its called The Eraser.
nigel produced & arranged it .
i wrote and played it.
the elements have been kicking round now for a few years and needed to be finished & i have been itching to do something like this for ages.
it was fun and quick to do.
inevitably it is more beats & electronics.
but its songs.
stanley did the cover.
yes its a record!
no its not a radiohead record.
as you know the band are now touring and writing new stuff and getting to a good space so i want no crap about me being a traitor or whatever splitting up blah blah...
this was all done with their blessing. and i don't wanna hear that word solo. doesnt sound right.
ok then thats that.

i think its out in july and im pretty certain XL are going to put it out.

love thom

Thom Yorke on The Eraser [interviewed Rolling Stone's David Fricke]

A lot of the basic ideas were kicking around when I got all of my software on my laptop. They weren't things that would ever get to the band; they just worked in that isolated laptop space. There was no point in going to the others and saying, "Phil, do you want to try a beat on this?" Or, "Colin, do you want to play some bass?" Because the sounds and ideas were not from that sort of vibe.

What kind of vibe was it?

I would split up rhythm patterns and manipulate sounds to get to a brand new place. It was stuff that I do when I'm bored, really -- something I'd do when I'd sit in front of the television or traveling around.

It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. I wanted to work on my own. It wasn't casting aspersions on anybody. I just wanted to see what it would be like. Luckily, I happen to be in a band where nobody has a problem with that. In fact, I think there was some sense of relief, that finally I was going to do it. Rather than saying it and chickening out.

The biggest surprise on The Eraser is how clear and clean your voice is.

I kept begging Nigel to put more reverb on it. "No, I'm not doing reverb on this record." Please hide my voice. "No."

But I'm always looking for things that make me want to sing. They're not necessarily chord progressions. It can be a rhythm, with one note on it. In the last song, "Cymbal Rush," the first bit you hear is something I had for three years: one little note. I could hear the melody in there straightaway. But if you played it to anyone else without me singing it, you'd think, "What's he on about?"

There were all these random electronic doodles, but being forced by Nigel to isolate down to the best bits made me realize these were the best bits. All I could see was how clever my programming was. Suddenly I was being forced to forget all that and be the singer again. And I wasn't thinking about Radiohead. I never thought, "I should stop here. I should give this to the band." Once I made the decision to do this record, that's what I was writing for.

Were these songs written in a concentrated period?

Absolutely, except for "Cymbal Rush" -- that riff that had been around for ages -- and "The Eraser," where the piano chords are Jonny's. I recorded them on a dictaphone around his house one day. A year and a half later, I had to own up that I had sampled them, cut them into a different order and made them into a song [laughs]. "Is that alright? Sorry, Jonny."

"Harrowdown Hill" was kicking around during Hail to the Thief, but there was no way that was going to work with the band. "And It Rained All Night" has this enormously shredded-up element of "The Gloaming" [from Hail to the Thief], not that you'd ever I remember doing that in New York. I couldn't sleep one night, and it was one of those New York things, where the rain just chucks down. The rain was so loud.

"Black Swan" has this tiny, shredded segment of something that was one of the library samples we had. It was Ed and Phil doing this thing, and I sliced it into bits. The sample was 2000, but the song was 2005.

Your writing has always been intensely personal and conflicted, but because your voice is so up front on The Eraser, the words and images come through so vividly, as in "Analyse."

[Sings] "Power cuts and blackouts/Sleeping like babies." I used to live in central Oxford, on one of those historical streets, with all these houses built in the 1860s. I came home one night and for some reason, the street had a power cut. The houses were all dark, with candlelight in the windows, which is obviously how it would have been when they were built. It was beautiful.

I also like the lines in "Black Swan": "You cannot kick-start a dead horse/You just cross yourself and walk away."

[Laughs] As always, whatever psychic garbage you've got going on in your head, you end up using it. You should have seen the stuff I didn't put in. That's the shit you don't want to know about.

Stanley Donwood on the artwork for The Eraser:

This work was started in November 2005, whilst a record that was eventually called The Eraser was being worked on in Covent Garden, London. I didn't know that this would become the artwork that would accompany this record, although I hoped that it would, for several reasons too vague and tenuous to go into here. Which is one of the reasons why the record is called The Eraser and the artwork is called London Views.

Another intention was to exhibit the completed project at Lazarides in Greek Street, just over the Charing Cross Road in Soho. This show opened on 19th May 2006, after an opening night which passed eventfully enough. London Views is a picture of London, an apocalyptic panorama that stretches from the Thames estuary upstream to beyond the familiar structures of the gherkin, the NatWest tower, Big Ben and Battersea Power Station. This medievalised vision of apocalypse in England's capital city was carved on 14 pieces of linoleum with one small cutting tool. The original blocks make up a picture about twelve feet long, which has been painstakingly hand-burnished on to beautiful Japanese Kozo paper, as it has so far proved impossible to print this using a press. Thus the edition is extremely small; only 8 have been made.

Each of the 14 sections were first proofed on a huge cast-iron printing press, an Albion made in 1860, scanned, and printed on to large aluminium/polymer composite panels, which in turn were caged with diamond-pattern wire, reminiscent of the Evening Standard headline-boards that infect the capital with their own dire predictions. Each of these panels are 75 cm wide x 140 cm high.

In addition to these, the exhibition shows individual relief prints from the original linocuts printed on that Albion Press, a selection of limited edition screen prints , and a small concertina-folded booklet showing the entire panorama. For those of you that imagine the dreadful consequences of late-period Western capitalism are not irretrievably final, I have made 33 jigsaw puzzles of disaster. These will be probably the most expensive jigsaws ever retailed. I wish you luck in the reassembly of our civilisation's Golden Era.