Radiohead launches trippy PolyFauna app on Android and iOS

12 Feb 2014

An image from the Polyfauna app

British rock band Radiohead has released an app, known as PolyFauna, that probably makes more sense to Radiohead than everyone else.

Announcing its launch in a blog post, lead singer Thom Yorke described the app as “an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.”

Always ones for exploring the weirder elements of artistic expression, the app supposedly stemmed from Yorke and the band’s interest in early computer life experiments and the imagined creatures of their subconscious.

After downloading the large file-sized app, you might be wondering what exactly is going on in creators’ heads.

Polyfauna app

My own attempt at playing with the app…make of it what you will.

Once you enter the app, you hear a strange and haunting noise that isn’t instantly recognisable, but gradually a few notes might seem familiar to the more devoted fans.

You can then draw on the mostly grey-scale screen a series of weird contorted images and challenge yourself to follow the red dot that appears every so often on screen by moving your phone, and yourself, around the room.

Once you’ve created your warped and eerie design, you can take a photo of it through the app and post it on the app’s gallery online to revel in the strangeness of it all.

The app is available to download through Google Play and the App Store.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com