Black Mirror: 4 bands (and 1 song) named after optical devices

Seedy Canadian chamber-pop group the Hidden Cameras are performing Wednesday, Dec. 2 at the 7th Street Entry, and in the group's honor, we've collected a few optics-related musical entities—from strange convex mirrors to practical automotive components to squishy bits of human anatomy.

Optical apparatus: Headlights
What it is: Car-mounted lamps covered by a translucent reflective surface, which compounds the brilliance of the light source and allows drivers to see the road when it’s dark outside.
Relevant musical counterpart: Headlights. The Champaign, Ill.-based dream-pop quartetrecently released its third full-length, Wildlife, on Polyvinyl Records. Though the band's sophomore effort, 2008's Some Racing, Some Stopping, had a bright, sunshiny feel, Wildlife finds the band moving in a darker, more melancholy direction. It's like switching from high beams to low beams.

Optical apparatus: Camera obscura
What it is: A box with a mirror and a small hole that allows in light, which gets flipped upside down and projected against a surface. The resulting image shows depth even in its flatness, an attribute that allows artists to sketch the captured scene free of distortion. Some, including the painter David Hockney, think the camera obscura and similar aids were largely responsible for the development of one-point perspective during the Renaissance.
Relevant musical counterpart: Camera Obscura. The band's first albums sounded like those of a Belle And Sebastian clone. (It's no surprise—B&S frontman Stuart Murdoch produced the debut.) The last two releases, Let's Get Out Of This Country and My Maudlin Career, have seen the band experiment with lush harmonies, sophisticated arrangements, and the strong pipes of lead singer Tracyanne Campbell.

Optical apparatus: Black mirror
What it is: Also known as a Claude glass, this small, dark, and slightly convex mirror was carried around in the 18th and 19th centuries by artists and tourists, who used it to view landscapes in a painterly, diffuse light. It’s strange to imagine that this was a thing tourists did—standing with their backs to whatever they wanted to see and looking at it by way of a pocket-sized mirror.
Relevant musical counterpart: “Black Mirror,” the brooding opener off of Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. “The black mirror knows no reflection,” sings Win Butler. “It knows not pride or vanity.” They're pretty hard to find—besides, of course, in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum—but you can always try to make one yourself.

Optical apparatus: Binoculars
What it is: Two lenses attached to one another at roughly the distance of human eyes, allowing users to view distant objects with both eyes. Oh come on, you know what binoculars are.
Relevant musical counterpart: Kevin Rudolf—a rap-rocker signed to Cash Money Records, who has also produced albums for the likes of Cobra Starship—wasn’t always packaged as a bandanna-clad tough guy. Back in the '90s, he took the form of a sensitive balladeer called Binocular. An endorsement of a Binocular song about saying goodbye to a loved one, via a lovelorn commenter on YouTube: “It's 2:54 a.m. I've been playing this song for who knows how long, my eyes are sore from crying. Every moment without her feels like an eternity.”

Relevant optical apparatus: Eyeball
What it is: A sense organ that detects light and contours. Each eyeball is connected to an optic nerve, which sends visual information to the occipital lobe of the brain.
Relevant musical counterpart: Over a long career going back to the late 1960s, Louisiana's The Residents have cooked up some of the strangest music around—highly surrealistic, highly theatrical, and pretty polarizing. Perhaps the only weirder thing than the band's music is their 40-year anonymity: The band's public appearances are always in disguise, most iconically wearing giant eyeball masks that cover their entire heads. (Although maybe, just maybe, those eyeballs are their real heads...)