Brighton after dark: 1 October 2013

Bmusic

I used to write letters I used to sign my name / I used to sleep at night / Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain

Once upon a time, there was a magical place called MTV where all the music videos would play and be merry. Indeed, those days are long gone, but the internet isn’t such a bad replacement, eh?

These days, some of the most enjoyable music videos are interactive — the ones that take you on a delightful ride through a personalised audio-visual experience.

Arcade Fire’s new video, ‘Reflektor’, has arrived, and it’s a doozy; much more of an interactive experience than a music video. Visitors to JustAReflektor.com can both get a glimpse at the band’s new material and, using a mouse, mobile phone, or tablet, can manipulate the effects used the video. The clip was directed by longtime Arcade Fire collaborator Vincent Morisset, and was filmed in Jacmel, Haiti. According to the site containing the video, the clip tells the story of “a young woman who travels between her world and our own”, and by using a mouse to manipulate the images, that individual viewers thereby become “reflektors”.

Then there’s the group’s previous ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ located at TheWildernessDowntown.com which is a must see interactive video for the Arcade Fire track ‘We Used To Wait’ off their album The Suburbs. It offers a video with the weird rush of conflicted nostalgia that most of us feel when we look up our childhood homes on Google Street View. “Video” is probably actually the wrong term here. Arcade Fire teamed up with Chris Milk to create a personalised experience that opens up tons of windows on your desktop and uses your own address to create a rush of images that’ll be unique to whoever ends up watching.

The video is an amazing exploration of new media techniques and HTML5 programming. A work of art that will be of interest not only to Arcade Fire fans, but to anyone interested in the wide range of possibilities available with new HTML and CSS standards. Music moves from its origins of soundscapes into audio-visual landscapes to be interacted with.

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BAD Words: Ben Darling

Sade Ali parties with the Freshers at Audio

Last week I visited B**tard Pop at Audio on Thursday, it was my first time to this night but definitely not my last. Partying with the new promo team for DotDotDot Promotions showed me how the Freshers really do things. As I walked into the club ‘Welcome To Jamrock’ was playing and I knew from then that I was about to have a messy night.

Here are a few snaps courtesy of Justin De Souza (www.freshtodeath.com)

>DON’T MISS<

Faded
A fairly new addition to the midweek clubbing nights, Faded brings the best of fresh R’n’B and Hip Hop to the party animals who don’t need it to be the weekend to have a good time. From the team behind Lollipop.
Coalition, Tues 1 Oct, 11pm, £2/4

Why Wednesdays?
Why Wednesdays indeed. As a student night boasting to play some great chart music, what more excuse do you need to take a night off studying and blow off some well-deserved steam? Also open to steam accumulating non-students.
Wah Kiki, Weds 2 Oct, 10.30pm, £3

#Hashtag
Looking for funky house with added Twitter gimmicks on a Friday night? Well, you,re in luck as Smack provides just the thing. Take a break from all the other indie, poppyy, charty nights and funk it on a Friday night.
Smack, Fri 4 Oct, 8pm, £4/3

Vice
Well, well, one of Brighton’s newest club nights not only promises unbeatable music spread over two floors but to also leave you immorally corrupt due to a huge amount of debauchery and lost inhibitions. Party if you dare.
Life, Sat 5 Oct, 11pm, £5

Brighton noise

Alastair Reid on Brighton creativity
Unlike many young Brightonians, I’ve been lucky enough to live in the same house with the same people for a good number of years, unbeset by the woes of regular house moves. It is not without its troubles though. Creative types are thrift store magpies, building nests of threadbare instruments and sparky equipment that hope to somehow defy the laws of chemistry and become useful again. A trumpet with a turquoise tint, piano wires turned woody brown, crackling speakers fuzz out a tune on plastic keys until the melody is broken by another short circuit. There are working instruments, but they’re all part of an ongoing tessellation game between guitar cases and broken mixing desks that someone was meant to fix. Then there’s the cat. And no one cleans the sink.

A chain supermarket down the road is the nearest to sell alcohol, the only controlled substance scientifically proven to stimulate creativity (blood alcohol level of 0.07, look it up), so we’ve come to know the staff who are in it for the long haul on a small talk, first name, “you alright mate?” “yeah, alright mate” basis. Stumbling towards the point in all this, it turns out one smiley and loquacious chap spotted “my ugly mug” on these here pages and is a writer and poet who is sending his first book to American publishers and won a recent Brighton poetry prize. Although somewhat trite, the conclusion I’m blindly scrabbling at is that our city is awash with those who want more and do more than just get by. An apocalyptic plague of ladettes and stag nights may swarm the streets on weekends but day to day, door to door, everyone is making their mark on the world in a way that we, as a community, should endeavour to discover, support, and appraise. Let’s remember that next time we’re buying a bottle of wine or walking down a terraced street of anonymous houses.

Ahem, music. The melancholy post-punk of oxymoronic Soft Arrows and Sigur Ros-on-steroids Nordic Giants both release records this week. Get on that. Then Son Belly, Kraken Mare and Nature Channel play the Green Door Store on Wednesday before a bumper session of new-wave Brighton bands play the same venue all day Sunday. Get on that too. Now, here’s to you Bradford Middleton. You would probably have said all this better than me.

Follow @BrightonNoise