Pulk-Pull* is an on-going investigation of Radiohead‘s music and art. The site was created on January 22, 2001 by Joseph Tate (also @josephtate) in Seattle, WA in the United States and since then he has been the sole author. He edited a collection of essays on the band published in May 2005 and has an essay on Karl Marx in Radiohead and Philosophy, a collection published in 2009.
The site takes its name from “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors,” the third song on the band’s fifth studio album entitled Amnesiac. For more information on the word “pulk,” see Message 40. The site’s individual entries are referred to as “messages.” This derives from “In Limbo,” the seventh song on Kid A in which the song’s speaker receives unreadable messages: “Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea / Another message I can’t read.” Given that context, this site’s messages are often “unreadable,” or not intended as traditional readings: the interpretative method can be non-linear, rhizomatic (after Deleuze and Guattari). Also, the band’s music and art are treated as texts—cultural objects woven (hence “text” like “textile,” from Latin texere, to weave) together from pre-existing materials and traditions.
No information on the site is definitive. As Message 15 reads, quoting the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “[…] we find in texts only what we put into them […].” French phenomenology aside, a guiding principle is that readers participate in the texts they read: what one reader discovers, another discards.
Readers occasionally submit information to the site. When I post such information, the contributor is credited. Not all submitted material is used.
You can contact Joseph using this email address: joseph @ pulk-pull.org.
Thank you for visiting.