Grizzly Bear - Knife ｜ A Take Away Show

2006

Grizzly Bear - Knife ｜ A Take Away Show (2006) Director: Vincent Moon Era: Indie Web Video Era (2006) - Pre-YouTube dominance; La Blogothèque's Take Away Shows pioneer guerrilla street performance filmmaking as a new form of music documentation, predating the album Yellow House (2006) by months. Exceptional. This is a founding artifact of the Take Away Shows canon, one of the first ten sessions ever produced, filmed when Grizzly Bear were virtually unknown. It documents a song that would become a touchstone of its era in its most raw, pre-release form. The session is directly cited in subsequent La Blogothèque lore and influenced the a cappella street performance approach adopted by other artists. As a zero-budget, single-take street document of a career-defining song, its historical and aesthetic value substantially exceeds its modest technical production. Context: Filmed in the Charonne district of Paris in May 2006, this session is Take Away Show #10 for La Blogothèque, one of the earliest entries in a format that would redefine web-native music video. Grizzly Bear, then largely unknown outside Brooklyn underground circles, performed an entirely a cappella, unplanned version of 'Knife' while walking Paris streets without instruments. The clip was filmed nearly a full year before the song's official single release on Warp Records (May 2007), functioning as a raw pre-release document. The session embodies the blog-era ethos of radical informality: no label budget, no production design, no post-processing, shot on a single small digital camera by Vincent Moon. The Take Away Shows concept, take the band outside, film in one unbroken take, release freely on the web, was itself a direct response to the artificiality of commercial music video. This session became one of the most-referenced early examples of the format, influencing a generation of DIY music film projects globally. Director notes: This video is Take Away Show #10 for La Blogothèque, filmed in the Charonne district of Paris in May 2006. Images, filming, and edit are credited to Vincent Moon; sound is credited to Chryde; produced by Chryde for La Blogothèque. The band had no instruments with them and performed an entirely a cappella version of 'Knife' while walking through the streets of Paris. The session was filmed in the Take Away Shows format: single-camera, minimal takes, improvised outdoor location, no rehearsal. The video predates the official release of 'Knife' as a single (May 21, 2007) by nearly a year, making it an early document of the song. The Vimeo release is split across four parts (vimeo.com/11525862, vimeo.com/10379213, vimeo.com/11525978, vimeo.com/11546983). The session is widely cited as one of the landmark early Take Away Shows, with the a cappella street performance format later referenced by other La Blogothèque subjects including Bon Iver.