Image Credit: Eric KayneThe Wilderness Downtown, the interactive website that Arcade Fire released last week for their song “We Used To Wait,” is something very different from a typical indie-rock promotional clip. So it’s fitting that the band hired a director, Chris Milk, who despite his impressive résumé in the field — Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” and “Touch the Sky,” U2 & Green Day’s “The Saints Are Coming” — has decidedly mixed feelings about the music video medium. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how music videos could ever achieve the emotional resonance of straight music,” Milk says in an email exchange with the Music Mix. “Honestly, I’m not sure music videos can ever really touch you as deeply as music alone can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid because they rely on someone else’s vision. Sometimes mine.”

Cutting-edge Web elements help make The Wilderness Downtown a more personal, immersive experience. Viewers enter an address of their choice (preferably their childhood home), calling up images from Google Maps at key moments in the song. As the music goes on, viewers can also enter messages to their younger selves which are then incorporated into the presentation. “By letting the audience participate in the visuals, we allow for more of an emotional connection,” Milk says. READ FULL STORY »