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.
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.