Plenty of well-known directors have started out doing music videos — the relatively brief nature of the form, along with its virtually limitless scope for experimentation and self-expression, makes it a fine place to cut your filmmaking teeth. This remains the case even if the band haven’t actually asked you to make a video, and the advent of the internet (and, specifically, YouTube) means that aspiring directors now have a huge potential audience for their clips. The result has been a surfeit of fantastic fan-made music videos over the last few years. Here’s a selection of our favorites — we’re sure there are plenty more, so let us know what else we might have included. Read More »
1. All in all, we thought that last night’s MTV Video Music Awards were pretty boring. The one thing that kept us from turning it off was a promised first look at The Hunger Games, and even that turned out to be a totally underwhelming clip of Jennifer Lawrence hopping over a log.
2. Beyoncé was showing off what looked to be a tiny baby bump on the award show’s red carpet, and now her rep has confirmed it: she and Jay-Z are expecting their first child! [via Just Jared]
3. We’ve known for a while that Michel Gondry was planning to make a film with Audrey Tautou, but now we have some additional details; an “offbeat romance,” the project is an adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’Écume des Jours, and will co-star French actor Romain Duris. [via Slashfilm]
4. Sofia Coppola and her longtime partner Thomas Mars of Phoenix got married over the weekend at her family’s 19-century mansion in Bernalda, Italy. Among the famous names on the 80-person guest list: George Lucas, Johnny Depp, and Jason Schwartzman. [via LAT]
5. Here is your first look at John Goodman’s upcoming appearance on Community where he’ll be playing the vice dean of Greendale Community College’s air conditioning repair program.
If you’re in any way interested in the Olympics, you might remember reading a while back that there’d been a mild controversy on the other side of the Atlantic about the use of The Clash’s classic song “London Calling” in some of the promotional videos for the games in London next year. (Since then, it’s turned out that The Clash are the least of London’s PR problems, but still.) Anyway, the whole thing has been playing on our mind for the last couple of weeks, until we realized what bugged us so much about it — the fact that “London Calling” is being used to promote anything. This isn’t unprecedented, of course — the song has been used in commercials before — but even so, it hasn’t joined the ranks of songs forever ruined by advertisements. As advertisers know only too well, once an image associates itself to music and lodges in your head, it’s damn near impossible to get rid of. And unfortunately, it’s too late for the songs we’ve collected after the jump — are there any that spring to mind for you?
We were intrigued to hear the news last week that Radiohead are planning on releasing a series of 12″ remixes of the songs from The King of Limbs, handing over the album tracks to producers like Flying Lotus and Caribou to cut up and reinterpret. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their love of all things electronic, Radiohead have always been enlightened when it comes to having their tracks reworked, so much so that there are a couple of Radiohead remixes out there that arguably improve on the original versions. These got us thinking about other guitar-based or otherwise rock-inflected tracks that have been improved by remixing – they’re surprisingly few and far between, perhaps because writers of rock songs have been loath to let producers deconstruct them over the years. We’ve collected ten of our favorites; additional suggestions are, as ever, welcome.
Welcome to October, friends, the month when our taste for pop gently turns to thoughts of the lush, orchestral sounds that get us through the colder months. (This often means listening to Pet Sounds endlessly.) This week brings a stunningly diverse array of tracks from consummate weirdo Gary Young, the inestimable Neil Young, and an upstart rapper who rhymes “spatula” with “Dracula.” Right click and “Save As” to download the tracks, or jump to the bottom of the page to listen to the whole mix.
Focusing on new technology, the Creators Project is an online and real-world hub for groundbreaking work from some of the best visual, multimedia, and musical artists of the digital age.
Founded by Vice and Intel, the Project pairs an increasingly intriguing web archive of work by the likes of Spike Jonze, Diplo, Romain Gavras, Danny Perez, Mark Ronson, Phoenix, and James Powderly with a series of immersive music and art events taking place in major metropolises throughout 2010. Next up is Seoul on August 28, followed by Beijing on September 17.
This week marks our 30th mixtape. We may not be getting all “XXX,” Roman-style, but we have managed to narrow the week’s choicest mp3s down to our ten favorites. Keep your eyes peeled for new material from the Arcade Fire, Maximum Balloon (Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio), and some long-lost cousins of Phoenix. Right Click + Save As individual songs, or scroll to the bottom to get the entire mixtape, after the jump.
The trailer for Sofia Coppola’s first film since 2006′s polarizing Marie Antoinette begins with the neon sign for the Chateau Marmonth — you know, that place Courtney Love is always name-dropping. We meet Stephen Dorff, whose main activities seem to comprise checking out women, looking bored, and checking out women (two of them, dressed like candy stripers in sky-high heels and pole dancing). But when his young daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) is sent to live with him, he seems to spring out of his ennui. From there, it’s all Guitar Hero and underwater tea parties. Since the clip is practically wordless, we’re not sure what the substance of the movie will be, plot-wise, yet. The visuals are gorgeous, though, and we’re happy to see Dorff make a comeback. (Remember S.F.W.?) Plus, Phoenix are soundtracking the film! What do you think about this first glimpse of Somewhere? Read More »
What do you do when Grizzly Bear asks you to remix one of their songs but you think it’s too perfect to touch? If you’re Phoenix, you throw up an awesome little page that allows fans to make their own mashup of “Foreground” and Brian Eno’s “Canon in D Major.” The resulting juxtaposition is seriously satisfying and easy enough for even the most amateur of DJs to master. As Phoenix so eloquently explains, “[W]e figured, maybe if we combine great things together (Grizzly Bear, Eno, chance), it would create something good.” Well, by that humble measure, we think they certainly succeeded. [via Creators Project]
French music site La Blogothèque’s self-produced Take Away Shows feature exclusive, unedited footage of top indie artists performing in public places.
Shooting bands on the street, in the subway, or in a restaurant, auteurs like Vincent Moon (also a co-founder of the site) capture the devil-may-care nature of impromptu performances by artists such as Phoenix, Fleet Foxes, Arcade Fire, St. Vincent, and even R.E.M.
