Radiohead & Hans Zimmer – “(ocean) bloom”

Grant Pollard/Invision/AP

Radiohead & Hans Zimmer – “(ocean) bloom”

Grant Pollard/Invision/AP

A couple of months ago, we reported that Radiohead and the famous film composer Hans Zimmer were working on a new version of “Bloom,” the opening track from their album The King Of Limbs, with new vocals recorded by Thom Yorke. The original track was inspired by the BBC nature documentary Blue Planet, and the new version of the song would appear on the soundtrack to Blue Planet II, the documentary’s sequel. Today, the BBC debuted a long teaser for the show, with “ocean (bloom),” that Radiohead/Zimmer collaboration, soundtracking it. Here’s that teaser:

To hear a version of “ocean (bloom)” without David Attenborough’s narration over it, head over here and skip to the 51:22 mark. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, along with Zimmer, recently spoke with BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt about the process of recording the track. In the interview, Yorke had this to say:

This was me lying on the sofa trying to go back to sleep when I’ve been up too late with my son — 7 o’clock in the morning when he was small — and it coming in and out of my subconscious. And staying there, and you know especially stuff about the deep and these life forms they’d discovered on that series, that seemed to be the implication, that they managed to go so deep that they’d discovered all these creatures that existed they we didn’t know about. That whole thing for me, the idea of discovering life that humanity doesn’t know about, is to me one of the most profound kind of things, profound concepts. Even if it’s discovering fossils, or the idea that creatures exist — that there’s a history to the place we live that we don’t know anything about — to me is the most profound, spiritual expression of humanity when we discover it. The Blue Planet — the original series — was probably the thing, first it turned on my son to the whole thing, and he became obsessed, as you do when you’re growing up at that age, 5 or 6, you get all the books and you recite the statistics, all the Latin names, which is what you used to do. And then a letter from Greenpeace came through about something or other to the house, and he started reading it and said “Dad, can we get involved in this?” “Yeah, sure, if you want to.” So then we established links with Greenpeace. Anyway, I got involved in all this stuff over the years, and it started with being half asleep on the sofa watching Blue Planet!

Here’s the BBC 6 Music interview:

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