Jonny Greenwood
Jonny Greenwood
Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwoodis an English musician and composer best known as the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the alternative rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, Greenwood also plays instruments including the bass guitar, piano, viola, and drums, and is a prominent player of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. He works with electronic techniques such as programming, sampling and looping, and writes music software used by Radiohead. He has been named one of the greatest guitarists of all...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth5 November 1971
cds format seen though
I've seen 13, 14-year-olds opening CDs as though they're records from the 1920s, going 'Look at this - there's a little book!'... That makes me think the format has probably had its day.
bands composers influenced interested longer music range twin unusual wide
It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.
english-musician far love quality terms time worse
It's kind of not about the quality of the art, as much as this is what I love doing and I'd have a worse time doing anything else. That's kind of as far as I think in terms of philosophy.
bizarre future imagine involving modern music people playing taking
If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing.
annoys days doubt english-musician fate given green guitars mind miss people reverence shall songs worked
Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments,and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved- and while the reverence given to guitars annoys me, I shall miss it.
english-musician french recording soundtrack
There's the soundtrack to The French Connection II'I think It's my favorite soundtrack. It hasn't been released. I actually had to go and get the film and just make a recording of it to get the music.
cd days endless finite great home length music partly prefer quiet room separate sound stored unlike
If I'm on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they're finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.
rhythms satisfying short term
I think rhythms can be more satisfying in the short term - like, more immediately. It can be kind of obsessively and compulsively rewarding.
concert electronic feels funny hall hear orchestra pieces plays sound time
It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me.
coming saw speakers
When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in '92 or '93, I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, 'Where is this all coming from?' And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.
rocks dancing people
When people say you're doing something radical in rock or dance music, I'm not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It's like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.
listening listening-to-music
I'm quite into listening to music and not doing anything else.
guitar bounds guitar-playing
Anything that has more of Graham's guitar playing, I'm bound to like.
fifteen cassettes
I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I'm sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles.