A few weeks ago, Ed Norton provided some non-specific fun facts about Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke offering “tons and tons” of “sound experiments” to director John Curran for use in his new film, Stone, starring Norton, Robert De Niro, and Milla Jovovich. Great news, but details were scarce regarding Yorke and Greenwood’s compositions making their way into the final film, as well as the background of the film’s main musical contributor, mistakenly transcribed as “John O’Brien” by Variety. As it turns out, O’Brien is actually Jon Brion, the great multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer for the likes of Fiona Apple, Of Montreal, Spoon, and Kanye, among others. Norton told Examiner:
[Greenwood and Yorke] had files and files and files of stuff, like taking instruments and literally breaking them down into wave forms and sounds…and they flipped a bunch of stuff off to us, to just play with and then we worked with their engineer a bit, but then you needed themes too, so [Curran] went to Jon Brion, as we both really love his work, and it seemed in sync in many ways with what the Radiohead guys play with. [Brion] does a lot of atonal, arrhythmic stuff, so Jonny recorded some organs, [Brion] recorded some organs, [Curran] did some things and then two of the sound engineers came up with some textural stuff. And at the end of the day, John Curran really conducted it all, he just threw it all into a Cuisinart to create this sort of soundscape. It was fun, very experimental and very unusual.
So there you have it: Brion, Yorke, Greenwood, and Curran, blended together via “Cuisinart.” (Lots of cooks in the kitchen.) Hear a clip of their sonic Stone soup over on the official site.