That’s (ocean) bloom, a Radiohead and Hans
Zimmer composition for BBC’s Blue Planet
II series.
It’s a lush, orchestral song that feels
like the ebb and flow of the ocean.
But it’s a rework of a 2011 Radiohead track
that sounds a lot different.
When Radiohead’s Thom Yorke first wrote
Bloom, he was inspired by the original Blue
Planet series from 2001.
The song turned out to be a complex mix of
piano loops and syncopated drums.
In 2017, the band was brought in to adapt
that track for the Blue Planet sequel with
composer Hans Zimmer.
This time, they were faced with a unique challenge:
How do you turn an experimental rock song
into a soundtrack — for the ocean?
They found their inspiration in a painting
technique in which small individual dots create
a whole image.
Pointillism, painting pointillism.
And started to talk about these ideas —
I used to draw exactly that after going surfing,
I would do exactly that.
Alright okay so we were obviously, there
seems to be a consensus here that we were on the
right track.
And we came over here, and  just started to do these gestures withthe orchestra, these tiny little fragments
of sound.
Sometimes it would be like light, sometimes it would be like little
waves.
They sort of became the vocabulary for this.
I think that was part of the idea — let's
not just start with the tune, let’s start
with figuring out a new technique.
A new method of how to present whatever the
notes are.
If you listen closely to the track, you can
hear that method at work — it’s a trick
they call the “tidal orchestra”.
This sound forms the base layer of the entire
soundtrack — it’s always present.
It creates a whole musical environment that’s
built out of a single note.
Hans has done that before — the Joker Theme
in The Dark Knight is just one stretched cello
note.
But that was just one instrument — here, you have
an entire orchestra playing a single note
-- and that was made possible because of one simple rule.
We instructed the players to not play at the
same time when there was a long note.
The conductor would say: “when the guy next
to you is playing, don't play.”
You can hear this when you isolate the tidal
orchestra track.
You know, as your note dies away, just look
at you know, whoever’s sitting next to you
— let them swell in their note.
… And you get these beautiful sort of waves,
and just for a moment the individual player
is heard and then sinks back into you know,
the mass.
It's exactly what, if you look at the ocean long enough, that’s exactly what it does.
In terms of, back to the pointillism things,
it's basically, if you really look at it, it’s triangles
that come in and out, and seep in and out
all the time.
And they never stop, they never never never stop.
Think of it like a musical version of mathematician
John Conway’s Game of Life — there’s
a basic rule about when a note dies, when
it remains, and when it reproduces.
Let that play out, and the orchestra takes
on an organic feeling.
This track follows in a rich tradition of
using randomness in music.
As far back as the 1700s, compositional dice
games were quite popular.
Players would roll dice to generate a song
based on pre-composed musical fragments, and
then perform it.
In 1953, composer Earle Brown wrote a piece
called Twenty-Five Pages — it’s an unnumbered
set of pages of music that can be played in
any order, with either side up, and with notes
read as either treble or bass clef.
Shortly after, Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote
Klavierstück XI, where a performer can pick
from 19 segments randomly — the song is
over after they’ve played one fragment three times.
And in 1964, composer Terry Riley wrote “In
C”.
It’s a series of 53 short musical phrases
that players can move through at their own
pace, weaving in and out of sync.
Music like this is called “aleatoric”
— it’s when a part of the composition
or performance is left up to chance, or to
a player’s choices.
The “Ocean Bloom” rework makes those choices
available on an orchestral level, but it's
an effect that was already part of the original
Radiohead track.
You can hear it when you take away the drums,
which is exactly what Thom did at a performance
in Paris in 2016.
I thought hang on, maybe I can do it on piano
and came up with a way of really crude way
to play on piano.
Which was kind of discovering the song again,
in a super simple way.
Because up until that point, it had always
been about the rhythms that shift in and out,
and fall apart. Fall apart. Sometimes come together if we're lucky.
Usually fall apart.
Usually fall apart.
It's very interesting hearing Thom talk about the piano version, because that had a similar
sort of, degree of randomness, building all those loops on the piano.
Didn't know what I was doing.
You see the song in a different way.
It’s interesting how such a small scale
thing that Thom is doing is sort of — you’re
subconsciously doing the
same thing.
But with a huge orchestra.
As soon as you have an orchestra involved,
the complexity of that, all these players
playing together, that’s the glorious thing.
There’s no sound like it.
I think that's why it sounds so vital.
Blue Planet II airs from October 29th on BBC One in the UK and is coming soon to BBC America in 2018.
