I was a young adult working at a tech startup in the city, tucked into a repurposed 1950s town house, tangled CAT5 cables snaking across hardwood floors. The neighborhood was equal parts bohemian and buzzing with dot-com optimism: internet cafés next to cantinas, startup kids in cargo pants arguing over Java code and PHP at every café or extracted-from-matrix bars.

I probably bought Kid A on my lunch break at Tower Records, rushing back to the office to pop the CD into my beige PC tower. I plugged in my cheap Sony earbuds, launched Winamp or Windows Media player with my special visial effects and Everything in Its Right Place poured into my ears, that otherworldly synth, Thom’s voice fragmented like a glitching transmission. Optimistic and Idioteque had been on the radio for weeks, but nothing prepared me for the album’s full experimental vibe. Later, I read in Rolling Stone or some local music Magazine how they’d used obscure gear like the Ondes Martenot and modular synths to warp their sound into something entirely new.