Caught in the Net: Phoenix, Sunn O and Karen O

See Phoenix from above

It’s been a while since I last checked in on the French videographers at La Blogotheque whose “Take Away Shows” spawned a whole online genre of stripped-down music performance videos. For their latest trick they’ve hooked up with frequent collaborators Phoenix. The band perform a semi-acoustic take on their single “Entertainment” – see it at blogotheque.net – filmed in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, complete with sweeping views of the surrounds, all done in one spectacular aerial shot captured by a remote-controlled drone. Those drones have been getting such bad press lately, it’s nice to see someone out there offering the counter view.

The archive of experimental drones

The prolific experimental US musician Stephen O’Malley recently posted a link on Twitter (@IdeologicOrgan) to a tremendous online archive for his band Sunn O))). Given that the band has created its own wildly expansive sound-world of experimental noise, death and doom metal, drones (of the musical rather than aerial sort), ambience and much else, O’Malley did so with the appropriate words “to those about to drone we salute you!” In the tweet was a link to a Bandcamp site offering up the band’s entire back catalogue to stream online – you can pay for downloads, too, if you’re feeling generous. It’s all at sunn.bandcamp.com.

Karen O is ‘Her’ again

For his 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze enlisted the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O to create the soundtrack. Now she has contributed a song to the soundtrack of his new film, Her – about the love between one man and his computer operating system. “The Moon Song” is a sparse, lullaby-like effort with the singer’s vocals dancing gently along to acoustic guitar notes. It’s a free download at snd.sc/1ckwU3s.