Photo credit: Melissa Miller
In an unusual alignment of pop-cultural forces, Milwaukee has been graced by the presence of the composers of two separate soundtracks to the horror film Suspiria in the span of a single month—the first being Goblin, who lent their ominous prog to Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo original and recently appeared at the Oriental Theater, the second being Thom Yorke, who lent his paranoid sensibilities to the current, critically lauded remake. It’s an embarrassment of riches, but the similarities ended there, mostly because, for his rare Milwaukee performance, the eccentric Radiohead frontman chose to focus on other solo material as opposed to his latest score.
Opening the evening for Yorke at the Riverside Theater on Wednesday was Oliver Coates, a concert cellist turned experimental composer who combines his classical training with a bracing dash of raw electronica. Yet, aside from the occasional synthesized voice or broken beat, the old-school string instrument was still the main attraction, albeit fed-back, looped and generally mangled in a way that would make John Cale and/or Cage proud. While the set was far too ambient for what you might normally expect from a warm-up act, this particular audience was more than receptive to it to the point where they broke into a brief round of applause simply because he name-checked Brian Eno.
During the brief intermission, people continued to slowly filter into, but not exactly fill, the upper seats of theater. The empty seats were surprising for such a high-profile and heavily marketed show, but no one ever went to a concert and complained about all the additional legroom, especially one as captivating as this. As soon as Yorke and his nondescript-dressed backing band took the stage, to which, with its stark-white synthesizer consoles flanked by six massive video screens resembled the bridge of some TV starship, the audience was all but transfixed, starting with “Interference” from Yorke’s second solo outing, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
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From there, the emphasis continued to be on his respectable amount of non-Radiohead output, whether it be The Eraser’s “Black Swan,” “Default” from the oddball supergroup Atoms for Peace or even the as-yet unreleased “I’m a Very Rude Person.” Accompanied by elaborate visuals that looked something like the result of feeding the Mars Rover LSD, the lengthy set of deep cuts and B-sides curiously eschewed much of Suspiria, the ostensible reason for the tour, until the end of a lengthy encore. But, if Yorke’s set bore little connection to the film it was presumably meant to promote, it was still a musical tour de force.
