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Stella Artois Presents: Cold War Kids - "A Million Eyes" (The Chalice Symphony)


It seems as though Belgian beer-maker Stella Artois has seen a recent surge in popularity due to a cross-promotion deal with HBO's eight-episode mini-series, True Detective. I recently had their apple cidre (cider) beer at local watering hole Oar House and it was pretty damn great; the sheer genesis of this very post was actually a Stella Cidre TV commercial that I saw yesterday afternoon. After a little bit of rooting around through the vast pages of Google, I managed to stumble upon @StellaArtios' Twitter handle, which led me to an interesting March 4th Tweet: "Glad you think so! MT @Esquiremag @StellaArtois @ColdWarKids and an engineer made music out of beer [glasses] and it's awesome." The web-linked Esquire piece further notes that "last March, Stella Artois commissioned an M.I.T. sound engineer to spend a year building four instruments that draw their power from Stella chalices." Andy Cavatorta's beautiful designs dually function as instruments and lavish works of art, but most of us probably wouldn't be able to understand their creation, unless you're a fellow M.I.T. engineer (further information can be found at stellartois' YouTube channel). Upon the Star Harp, Pyrophone, Violina, and The Hive's finalized creation and warehouse storing, Stella recruited Cold War Kids, whom many of you may know from "Hang Me Out to Dry" (2008) fame, to write and record an original song using the one-of-a-kind chalice instruments. The final product, "A Million Eyes" fully utilizes the robot-harp, deep whistling, violin, and soft xylophone-like aspects of Cavatorta's creations, which have since collectively been dubbed The Chalice Symphony. It's now available from either Stella Artois' site for FREE download or the iTunes store for a $0.99 steal of a deal; a companion full-form Cold War Kids music video is supposedly in-the-works, as well.