As they accepted their award for Album of the Year on Grammy night 2011, an idea flashed into Arcade Fire’s collective head: they could be EGOT winners. Never mind that those things go to individual people, not generally entire bands; they’re the damn Arcade Fire! They’ll bend the tenets of award-giving, such is their passion. With Grammy in hand, they began scheming: For the Tony, they’d just write a musical, an idea so obvious the universe might as well have willed it into existence. Emmy, they’d surely get one for “Best Fallon Performance” eventually. Is that not a category yet? It will be. And the Oscar, just go and score a Spike Jonze movie.
Well, that didn’t work out as planned, the Academy’s voters opting for the score to astro-Bullock. So Arcade Fire have made their own movie, something that’s sure to win them an Oscar somehow. On September 24, The Reflektor Tapes will hit theaters for a limited run. The film tracks the process of their most recent album, Reflektor, following the band as they begin conceiving the album in Jamaica, record in Montreal, play an impromptu show in a Haitian hotel at the beginning of Carnival, and play arena shows in Los Angeles and London. Watch a short first-look trailer here:
Fueling the band’s award-magnet is director Kahlil Joseph, who has worked with Kendrick Lamar and FKA twigs, and has won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film at Sundance 2012 for his Until The Quiet Comes film with Flying Lotus. Producing the film are Pulse Films (the studio responsible for Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days On Earth and LCD Soundsystem’s Shut Up And Play The Hits) and artist co-operative What Matters Most, of whom Joseph is a member. In conjunction with the film’s announcement, the group has released a Joseph-directed video for Reflektor track “Porno,” which features footage from the film.
Cinema listings and tickets will be available here in the near future. To sweeten the deal, the film contains an unreleased track from the album’s sessions, along with 20 minutes of unseen footage for the cinema audience. With all that in place, all Arcade Fire must do is wait for the awards to roll in, so they may be blessed by EGOT’s radiance.
• Arcade Fire: http://arcadefire.com/site
• Pulse Films: http://www.pulsefilms.com
• What Matters Most: http://the-most.com
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