The Wilderness Downtown

Canadian indie rock band The Arcade Fire released their third studio album in August 2010. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called The Suburbs and it won Album of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards. Huge, huge deal for indie musicians and fans everywhere. The album deals with themes of nostalgia and the memory of a childhood home, and its music does a great job of stirring the emotions that the band wanted it to stir. Sixteen tracks of touching, insightful, and fearless rock music.

In November of 2010, the band released a website that hosted an interactive music video for their song "We Used to Wait". The film and website, called The Wilderness Downtown, was created by director Chris Milk using the programming language HTML5 and integrating it with Google Maps. Upon visiting the website, users type in their childhood address. A beautiful custom-generated music video is then created featuring images of their childhood home and neighborhood and the use of multiple, choreographed screens that move in time with the music.

The band really succeeded in making something special here. The majority of folks who have watched this film describe it as an aesthetic "experience", sharing the feelings of nostalgia that the band hoped to stir with the music on the album. What an incredible job of using technology and out-of-the-box creativity to support the purpose of the music.

But don't take my word for it, try it for yourself! I must warn that this is a processor-intensive website and some computers may have a difficult time running it. It also requires that you view it using Google Chrome as your browser. On that note... if you aren't already using Chrome, this is a good excuse to start. Because seriously, it blows Firefox and Explorer out of the water.

If for any reason you can't get the website to work for you, here's a great YouTube video of the film taken by someone who entered the name of a small town in Paris. It's not quite the full experience if it isn't your own town, but it's still a beautiful video to watch either way and the use of multiple screens is super cool.

If you're interested, you can read a bit more info about the video's features here.

If you or someone you know would like to share creative work, send an email to gscale88@comcast.net with "PWYP" in the subject line.