If you’re an avid Radiohead fan, then you’ve probably already downloaded their latest album, The King of Limbs. You’ve probably listened to it on repeat for several hours, Thom Yorke’s plaintive cryptic lullabies cossetting you in a mournful fug of despair. They’re a happy bunch, Radiohead.

The question is not what you think of the band’s latest opus, however, but rather whether you’ve noticed anything curious about the cover art. Both the MP3 and WAV versions of the album come with a huge 4.84 megabyte bitmap file of the album’s cover; a strange collage of silhoutted trees and eerie alien creatures.

What set me thinking was that the alien creatures seemed vaguely reminiscent of the images hidden in Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker CD. In that case, the images weren’t on the cover itself, but hidden inside the music. While one of the atonal screeching segues between the CDs tracks seemed like the usual Aphex easy-listening fare, the sound actually contained a spectrogram of Aphex’s face. Now, with their penchant for teasing their fans with hidden or cryptic messages, I wonder whether Radiohead has done the same.

Indeed, open up the cover image with the demo version of Photosounder and the text across the albums centre begins to sound almost like distorted speech. I spent half an hour fiddling with the myriad settings, but still can’t decide whether I’m imagining things, or whether there’s something more sinister hidden within. I might listen to the album in a bit, too.

This fantastic video from James Houston was made in response to an online remix contest from Radiohead which invited musicians to reinterpret tracks from their recent album, In Rainbows.

Some of the results were fantastic, most were not. Houston took things a step further than most, hacking vintage hardware to recreate the different instruments in the song.

It impressed me because not only did it take one of my favourite tracks, Nude, and put an interesting spin on it (although it admittedly barely changes the arrangement), but also because it was full of vintage gadgetry and included an excellent video captured in a lovely 70’s school-science-film effect.

It takes a minute or two to get started, so be patient – the guitar section needs to load up on the ZX Spectrum. Here’s the full list of instruments from the track;

Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitar
Epson LX-86 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
HP Scanjet 4c – Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array – Vocals