An Australian artist turned Thom Yorke’s music into art. Expect magic

The world according to Thom Yorke is no garden party. “Get inside and close the curtains,” is the first decipherable sentence in a panic of distorted voices at the beginning of Tall Tales , a three-way visual and audio collaboration hitting cinema screens next week.

The Radiohead frontman joined producer and electronic artist Mark Pritchard and Australian artist/designer Jonathan Zawada to create what is being touted as “a fairytale for the modern world; depicting rising tides, kings and queens, Amazon logistics and robotic arms under iridescent skies”.

“I got very lucky”: Jonathan Zawada collaborated with Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke on Tall Tales.Credit: Pierre Toussaint

Pritchard’s soundscape is all seasick sirens and menacing rumble. On screen, the roving beam of a lighthouse on a dark, heaving ocean morphs to reveal demonic faces within, watching …

“I got very lucky,” says Zawada, the guy responsible for the project’s stunning visual component. “This was unique for me. A lot of the work I’ve done in the past has been with music producers that are less lyrically led.”

His video work for the Avalanches, the Presets and Flume springs to mind. When UK-born/Sydney-based Pritchard invited him into a pandemic to-and-fro with Yorke, Zawada’s world-building was destined for dark new horizons. Cue authoritarian surveillance, the ruthless edge of technological progress and systems stressed to collapsing.

Tall Tales is “the feeling of being cast adrift in an ever-collapsing present”, according to the official blurb. The idea of “juxtaposing uneasy landscapes of natural beauty with the brutal aesthetics of a world that has landed well short of the utopian future it once dared imagine” played neatly into Zawada’s creative heartland.

“I’ve always loved Radiohead and Thom’s work because of its obtuseness, in a way, lyrically,” says the artist perhaps best known for his fantastic animation of the Sydney Opera House sails in 2018. “It was interesting for me talking to Thom and finding out some more specific reference points, whether they were books or stories or various other intentions, and then using that as creative fodder.

“But I’m much more about the feeling and, to be honest, I mishear a lot of lyrics … so I tend not to trust my interpretations too much. In this case, it was more about the aggregation of all the imagery that was in the lyrics, rather than any specific phrases.”

Gangsters, left, and This Conversation is Missing Your Voice (details).Credit: Tall Tales

It’s a good way of describing the cumulative experience of Tall Tales. The project exists as a standalone album, loaded with all the subliminal anxiety we’ve come to expect from Radiohead, as well as from Yorke’s other band The Smile and his solo albums, but taking cues this time from Pritchard’s analogue synth compositions.

Zawada’s visual worlds — one for each song on the album but sequenced very differently in the film — are no less abstract in their various ways. The narrative is loose at best and his pieces wildly divergent in style, from CGI and painterly animations to found and heavily treated archive footage.

“The breadcrumb trail,” as he puts it, is in its in-between scenes, in which a bemused vagabond bird hops from one locale to another on a computer-generated island spinning in the sky.

“It evolved very slowly and organically over time,” Zawada says of the project, which drew the trio closer as files were emailed and Zoom calls coordinated over more than three years. “At some point Thom said something about an actual filmic narrative, which made sense because in my mind, they’re all existing in the same space, [even if] aesthetically they’re all so diverse.

“I stumbled upon this idea of the island, really stolen from Super Mario Brothers and these video games where you have a map and this little guy, this core character, that was washed up and then subjected to trying to figure out how it worked and how to potentially get off the island.”

Back in The Game, left, and The Spirit (details).Credit: Tall Tales

The metaphor doubtless felt especially apt in the throes of COVID isolation but again, it’s not a far cry from Yorke’s baseline view of a claustrophobic world gone wrong, in desperate need of off-ramps.

“I do sympathise with that in a lot of ways,” Zawada says with a laugh, “but there’s an aspect to Thom that I feel comes from a place that thinks there is a better way to be, and some people are stopping us from having that better way.

“My perspective is possibly a little more bleak ... which is more like, yeah, all those negativities are true, but there’s nothing in our way. There is no grand machine that is preventing us from having something better. This is just a part of what life is.

“I’ve done a lot of artwork projects in the past around ideas about systems and the interactions of complex systems. I’m quite pessimistic about a lot of the same things that I think Thom is pessimistic about, but I don’t think there is an alternative, a better outcome. I’m more attracted to seeing what it is in the system that is creating that outcome from a subjective standpoint.”

From left, Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke.Credit: Pierre Toussaint

The miracle, as Tall Tales attests, is in finding beauty in that perspective. “And that is the act of being a person on this planet,” Zawada says. He points to This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice, a track released to YouTube in March. Inspired by Pritchard’s robotic rhythm and Yorke’s falsetto images of screen-fed consumerism, Zawada’s video puts us on a mesmerising conveyor belt ride through what looks like an Amazon dispatch warehouse.

“You know, those aspects of the system you can read as a machine that is oppressing us, or you can read as an unbelievably strange and unique manifestation of society and culture and commerce,” he says. “If you can get out of your own personal experience a little bit, of longing for some other thing, you can actually appreciate those things for what they are.

“I think there’s a way we romanticise the world which is very untrue. But there’s a way that you can step back from it and appreciate the very rich, deeply complex thing that is going on, without calling it Gaia and treating it like a magical, imaginary person.”

Ice Shelf, left, and A Fake in a Faker’s World (details). Credit: Tall Tales

Another track, A Fake In A Faker’s World, chimed with an idea Zawada had conceived years earlier. In the realised video, an army of synchronised robots produces endless landscape paintings which evolve from base ugliness to striking beauty and ingenuity: in turn a meta commentary on the AI processes involved in his own work.

“My feeling about AI and AI art is that there is something incredibly wonderful about it,” he says. “There’s a bunch of reasons why I hate it from a societal and a personal standpoint and experiential standpoint, but there’s also an undeniable magic to it.”

For all the film’s grim humour and discomforting allusions, its final scene, The Spirit, brings the undeniable magic of the human experience to an affecting conclusion. Rescued from the dead centre of Yorke and Pritchard’s album, its climactic place in Zawada’s film suggests an entirely different story.

“There’s nowhere to hide in that video. It’s a very pared-back, simple sort of piece. And once we put the whole film together and I watched the whole thing … that video somehow moved me to tears,” he says.

“That is a rare moment for me to get to, with my part of the equation … for all the elements to come together and genuinely feel like they’re creating something quite resonant and powerful, where the music and the visual world are adding together in a positive way.”

Tall Tales screens at select Palace cinemas in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, along with Melbourne’s Cinema Nova and ACMI (three sessions) on May 8; Jonathan Zawada and Mark Pritchard will attend a Q&A screening at ACMI’s 6pm session. The Tall Tales album is out on May 9 through Warp.