Chris Cunningham Appreciation

In the heyday of MTV, when the music video was almost as important as the song itself, the marriage of visuals and music reached new heights of innovation. A number of directors raised the artistic level of the medium, many of whom either came from or went on to the world of feature-length motion pictures, among them Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, and Mark Romanek. These pioneers of the art form showed the world how to create an iconic visual identity for a piece of music, and perhaps no director has been more important to the electronic music aesthetic than Chris Cunningham.

Start with Cunningham's first video for "Second Bad Vilbel" by Autechre, which provides a rough sense for both the abstract, surrealist vibe that he would bring to his work and his collaborative approach, making the visuals a true extension of the sound.


Cunningham frequently worked with Aphex Twin, including the slightly ridiculous--in a good way--video for "Windowlicker" (featuring the superimposed Aphex Twin faces previously used in his nightmarish "Come to Daddy" video) and a piece called "Monkey Drummer," which was originally a video installation using Aphex Twin's track "Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount."


Stanley Kubrick hired Cunningham for design and animatronic testing on his film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a project that would ultimately be directed by Steven Spielberg), and that work was clearly an influence on his video for Bjork's "All is Full of Love."


Cunningham captured Portishead's floating, dream-like sound in his video for their song "Only You."


Finally, one of my favorite videos of all time is for "Come On My Selector" by Squarepusher, where all of Cunningham's idiosyncrasies come together for a more narrative-oriented piece.