Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist

Christaan Felber for The New York TimesGreenwood, right, and Thom Yorke during sound check before a Radiohead concert in Miami.

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself.

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Greenwood's stage setup for a Radiohead show.

Greenwood cites an early-’90s concert of Penderecki’s music as a conversion experience; he’s obsessed with Penderecki the way a lot of people are obsessed with Radiohead. Chances are you’ve heard Penderecki’s music even if you think you haven’t; some of his more screaming-of-the-damned­ish pieces turned up on the soundtracks to “The Exorcist” and “The Shining,” and that’s his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” seemingly ringing in Clive Owen’s ears during the long urban-warfare tracking shot near the end of “Children of Men.” So there was something full-circle about the Sept. 12 session, given that Greenwood owes his profile as a classical composer in large part to his work in film, particularly his deeply Penderecki-indebted score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”

Alvernia Studios was founded in 2010 by the Polish radio mogul Stanislaw Tyczynski; it’s a full-service film production and postproduction studio that has six soundstages of varying massiveness. It is also a profoundly weird-looking place. This is because Tyczynski, in addition to being one of the richest men in Poland, is a huge fan of H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist/designer/night-terror-sufferer who’s most famous for creating the creepy biomechanical look of the aliens from the “Alien” movies. So nearly every inch of Alvernia has been modeled, at what looks like absurd expense, and with impressively bonkers disregard for the facility’s future resale value, on Giger’s work. All the hallways look like the birth canals of some extraterrestrial apex-predator with acid for blood. Even the men’s-room-door handles look like spinal columns. The complex itself is housed in 14 large domes linked by glass-enclosed tunnels; to get from one dome to another, you have to wait for a stone-faced, combat-booted security guard (no, seriously) to press his thumb to a keypad that opens a set of blast doors.

Yet as I sat in the control room (itself styled like the bridge of a doomed spacecraft) and listened as Greenwood and Graeme Stewart engaged in some “Lost in Translation”-ish negotiations with the Polish engineer at the mixing console — a stern woman in socks and sandals, with a sensible soccer-mom haircut — the studio’s bizarre aesthetic seemed appropriate for what they were doing on this day. “Dry and close and uncomfortable is good,” Stewart told the engineer. (He was trying to persuade her not to run the sound of the orchestra through a reverb unit called a Lexicon — “dry” in this context meant “unprocessed.”)

Greenwood tends to wince when he walks into a room, as if in anticipation of mortification to come. He was wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt; his black pants were tight but hung low on his hips; and his hair was a heedless mop. The overall schoolboy vibe was enhanced by the fact that he was still wearing his backpack, which contained a pinkish-orange T-shirt, a copy of the manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic novel “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” a MacBook and a spiralbound copy of the score for Pen­derecki’s “Polymorphia.” He’s 40, but he looks about 15; that’s roughly how old he was when he joined Radiohead, which makes me think back to someone who once suggested to me that when you join a band, you arrest at whatever age you were at that moment.