Well, this is strange: After threatening to sue last May to stop the release of Dark Night of the Soul — Danger Mouse’s collaboration with Sparklehorse and David Lynch — EMI has now dropped all protests, and there’s an official release date targeted for June. The details of the legal dispute were never disclosed, but speculation was that EMI was still pissed at Danger Mouse for The Grey Album (EMI controls the Beatles catalog) and didn’t want him releasing music with Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous, who was signed to EMI. Ironically, this just forced Danger Mouse to find another creative way to illegally distribute music owned by EMI: He released a Dark Night of the Soul book featuring Lynch’s photography along with a blank CD labeled “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” Surely the leak would have gotten around anyway, but we can’t imagine EMI was thrilled that Danger Mouse himself was encouraging the practice. So is that what led them to bury the hatchet? The official release just says “We can confirm that EMI are working with Brian Burton AKA Danger Mouse again, and are delighted to be doing so.” Then again, also presumably delighting EMI? Now that they’re buds, Burton will hopefully stop coming up with clever ways to promote the piracy of their intellectual property.
