After wowing fans with "The Suburbs" interactive short film "The Wilderness Downtow," -- which eerily combined their song "We Used To Wait" with Google Street View and satellite imagery of your own hometown -- the Montreal band have returned to the interactive well with "Just a Reflektor," the music video for their new, David Bowie-assisted bilingual single 'Reflektor.'
This one, however, is filmed in Jacmel, Haiti.
As video helmer Vincent Morisset explains on the Just a Reflektor site, the music video "explores the themes in Arcade Fire's 'Reflektor' through two devices simultaneously: the computer and smartphone/tablet. Filmed in Haiti the story follows a young woman (Axelle "Ebony" Munezero) who travels between her world and our own."
Arcade Fire's co-bandleader Régine Chassagne is of Haitian descent, with both parents having fled to Canada during the Duvalier dictatorship, and the band has spent much of their between album efforts on raising money and awareness for Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. Even matching donations up to $1 million.
(That said, it does seem a tad ironic that a music video intended to capture the essence of Haiti -- which is one of the poorest nations in the world, with more than half its population living on less than $1 day -- requires both a computer and a smartphone or tablet to experience as intended.)
Go to the 'Just a Reflektor' site with a Google Chrome browser to see the video, where you will also get a code to sync your smartphone/tablet allowing you to partially control the video's effects. But a computer mouse works, too, if you don't have one.
For more on how this darn thing works, we've posted the behind-the-scenes video above.
But Arcade Fire weren't done. They also released a non-interactive video for 'Reflektor' that features plenty of giant papier mache heads.
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