Arcade Fire Blow Our Interactive Video Minds

Above is a video example. To DIY head to www.thewildernessdowntown.com/.

You probably thought Arcade Fire were done blinding us with their brilliance post playing and broadcasting live an epic show at Madison Square Garden with direction from Terry Gilliam. Or maybe you were satisfied after they released their third LP The Suburbs which may actually eclipse anything you’ve heard or experienced in your life, ever. Perhaps you were already quite chuffed at wrapping your listening-lobes around this multi-instrumental magical octopus of a band that casually tinkers with piano, violin, viola, cello, double bass, xylophone, glockenspiel, keyboard, French horn, accordion, harp, mandolin and “hurdy-gurdy“s when your staple guitar/bass/drum combo doesn’t quite cut it. But this, my friends, will get the jaw of even the most hard-to-please fuss-face dropping straight to the floor with little hope of retraction.

Enough hyperbole! You and I and everyone we know already loves the track We Used To Wait off the latest Arcade Fire LP The Suburbs. Those jangling piano keys, humming strings and soaring vocals will get to you every time. But Chris Milk, in conjunction with Google (you will need to download Google Chrome to dive in, but trust, it’s worth the extra couple of clicks) has concocted an amazingly intricate interactive video experience he’s dubbed The Wilderness Downtown that taps into the very heart of our sense of home, nostalgia and personal experiences.

While many of us now work, live and travel far from the place we were born and raised this interactive video invites us to virtually revisit hometowns and histories. The adventure into the wilderness begins with you typing into a search field the address of where you grew up. The track then kicks in and explodes into a personalized series of browser windows that open and close to the beat of the song and takes us to the places we used to dig for worms, scrape our knees, crash our first cars and sneak home our first loves. Built using HTML5 and Google Street View, the video also includes an integrated drawing tool and a social viral element which allows you to share with the band, or some random stranger who just emerged from the wilderness alongside, all the memories that resurfaced in your 5-odd minute Arcade Fire induced trip down memory lane.

Dive down the rabbit hole and experience The Wilderness Downtown for yourself!

To learn more about the technical know-how that went into the making of The Wilderness Downtown visit the Google Chrome Experiments: The Wilderness Downtown site.

The Suburbs is out now and available through Merge Records.