Chris Peterson

I’m not a hipster, but one of my favorite bands is a little indie outfit called Beirut. They play Balkan folk – what I affectionally refer to as ‘horncore’ – with lots of beautiful, anthematic melodies and harmonies.

For example, here’s one of my favorite songs off of their album The Flying Cup Club:

In 2007, Beirut teamed up with La Blogotheque to film a series of “Take Away Shows”, where the band walked around cities in France playing their music live for people, like this:

These were such a success that Beirut and Blogotheque decided to make a feature-length music video movie, where the band wandered from hipster hovel to hipster hovel playing their horns all over the place.

I’ve been looking for this DVD for some time now. Some of the individual songs can be found on YouTube, Vimeo, etc, but I wanted high quality and the real thing. But emails to Beirut’s merch address went unanswered, and nothing was on eBay, Amazon, etc.

Finally, I emailed Beirut’s record label, BaDaBing Records, only to find out that they had ‘sold out years ago.’

In that case, I hazarded, is there any chance you’d make the files available for download? Since you’re not selling the DVD anymore?

I received two emails in quick succession:

Good suggestion…. Will look into that. Thanks!

and

Hey Chris, we just heard from La Blogotheque, and they’re fine with you sharing the video files wherever… since there aren’t any more dvd’s, I’m guessing you’ll need us to rip the files for you? Let us know if you have any expertise on how to go about that, but I’m sure we can figure it out. Sweet!

A week later, BaDaBing had mailed me one of two remaining copies of the DVD, with an express mandate to make them as widely available as possible.

So I did.

If you would like to have a copy of the no-longer-available musical movie masterpiece that is Beirut/Blogotheque’s Cheap Magic Inside, you have two options.

• Download the torrent from ThePirateBay, which, once it gets picked up, will probably be much faster.
• Download it from my server, which I plan to keep up and running indefinitely.

In either case, you can download the videos in one of two formats: 1) full-quality 720p H264 m4v files, or 2) iPhone/iPod Touch optimized m4v files.

If you want to replicate the DVD or prefer to rip the movie files in a different format yourself, you can also download a raw disc master in ISO, DMG, or CDR.

Please download / link / rehost / mirror these as you will to ensure the widest exposure and availability.

And, if you are so inclined, you might go throw some change at Beirut, BaDaBing, or Blogotheque to support them. While in some ways this move isn’t logically surprising – they’re not selling the DVDs anymore, so they haven’t lost any sales, and they’re making new fans – in the broader context of the music industry it’s stunning.

Merry Christmas, indie kids.