Dark Night Of The Soul

The story of Dark Night Of The Soul is an interesting one. Art direction and creative input from David Lynch (legend), with music driven by two divergent but singular artists - Sparklehorse and the ubiquitous DangerMouse - who collaborate with everyone from Black Francis to Iggy Pop, Julian from the Strokes, to The Flaming Lips.

Art and commerce are of course always at war. EMI got into a rather heated dispute with Danger Mouse so the album was released as a hand numbered 100pp+ book of photo by Lynch, with a blank CD-R and the note:

"For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will."

Strangely the album appeared on various file-sharing sites around the same time, which was May last year. EMI have refused to comment up until now where it looks like the album may be released after all later this year... although who'll they'll sell it to is another question.

What can we learn? Perhaps that many industries fail to recognise that the power has shifted away from their lumbering, litigious ways. Maybe that new models of distribution online should be embraced or ignored at your peril. It's better I keep my own counsel on the music industry, but I'm bringing this all up because you should check out the Dark Night Of The Soul website which was the FWA site of the day yesterday.

The site is built in Flash and combines David Lynch's penchant for lots of ominous black space with the innocence of children's pop up books. We love Flash websites but seemingly they're on the way out - and definitely not iPad friendly! The question then is how the future unfolds for interactivity online if Flash as a technology is going the way of the Record Company and HTML 5 is the next big thing... perhaps the next couple of years online will be as promising as they are terrifying...

Kind of like DNOTS.