by SHANE SINNOTT

The Radiohead story from last week still has a lot of mileage in it, as it turns out. A quick recap: a song called “These Are My Twisted Words” appeared on torrent and fan sites, billed as new Radiohead material. Included was a cryptic text file, of the kind that usually accompanies pirated software, which contained the phrase “Wall of Ice.” And then wallofice.com re323directed to Radiohead’s online store. Got that? The Internet was gaga with speculation, and the consensus seemed to be that an EP called Wall of Ice was about to be released. That didn’t happen. Instead, the band officially released the song for free on their Web site (tinyurl.com/pjcqa7) and as a torrent on mininova.org (tinyurl.com/rxtb7p). No word on an EP.

More interesting is that the wallofice.com site now says, “Don’t just publish bullshit only to get hits on your webpage. Don’t just create your own stories after reading one post on a message board. Get your facts straight.” Turns out the site might not have anything to do with the band, and was registered quickly after the song appeared. The current theory is that “wall of ice” comes from a webcomic called xkcd, where a stick figure goes, “Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let’s make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when and how I play my movies and music, and I won’t crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice” (xkcd.com/86). It’s hard to imagine that Radiohead still doesn’t have something to do with all this, but for now that’s the story.

Our old pal Lou Barlow is offering a behind-the-scenes look at the making of his new record, Goodnight Unknown, at the unfortunately-named Lootube, a video page that’s been put up at the Merge Records site (mergerecords.com/lootube). The site launched just now with a 30-minute documentary on the making of the album, which is behind-the-scenes in the best possible way—showing, literally, how the album was made. A new video is due every week till the album’s Oct. 6 release.