1. Dream Koala “Earth”
CG artists Adrien Peze and Albin Merle of Fabulous 3D returned this year to work with Dream Koala on this stunning video for the track “Earth“, off the musician’s 2014 LP Earth.Home.Destroyed. Delivering a powerful story of the earth’s collapse, coupled with brilliantly realized imagery of this end-game event, “Earth” represents the pinnacle of what music video’s can accomplish. Starring Dream Koala’s Yndi Ferreira as an intrepid voyager in his doomed capsule, Peze and Merle have created seamless CGI environments that depict, as Dream Koala puts it, “the fragility of the human race against the titanic forces of nature”.
2. Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn Sahm Buhl “F**k The Ghetto/Think About Outer Space”
Georgia is the audio/visual team of Justin Tripp and Brian Close, and the pair turned in some excellent visuals for Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn Sahm Buhl‘s “F**k The Ghetto/Think About Outer Space“. Making use of some brilliantly realized aerial footage, the video follows the track’s vocalist Rafael Sanchez. Often shot from the vantage of a high flying camera, his lone figure amid the cities’ dense geometry echoes Sanchez’s poetic call to ditch micro tribal dramas in favor of a more trans-human, macro perspective. Mind blowing!
3. METZ “The Swimmer”
Leblanc and Cudmore deliver an unforgettable video on a razor’s edge for this METZ track, “The Swimmer“. The duo is comprised of producer/cinematographer Michael Leblanc and writer/director Scott Cudmore, and the pair combine an elusive storyline with a wacky visual approach to great effect here. High anxiety prevails as we follow our curious protagonist through a really rough day. Using a series of animated GIFs and highly charged tableaux, this story goes from bad to worse–like getting stuck in the proverbial Chinese finger trap. While colorful casting and location makes this effort shine, Leblanc and Cudmore’s use of GIF-like snippets, stuck on “pause” to heighten the drama, provide an excellent visual equivalent to this track’s slow motion sonic throttling.
4. Oneohtrix Point Never “Repossession Sequence”
Oneohtrix Point Never returned to work with his visual muse Nate Boyce this year. Not only are Daniel Lopatin and Boyce currently touring in support of OPN’s Garden of Delete (Warp), with Boyce on guitar as well as providing his mind bending visuals to the performance, the artist also created this far-out animated short called “Repossesion Sequence“. Featuring Garden of Delete tracks “Freaky Eyes”, “Ezra”, and “Mutant Standard”, as well as a bit of a new composition, Boyce’s eerie and surreal 3-D animations imagine a bizarre future world of frightening machinery and apocalyptic cityscapes that combine the real and imaginary into frightening new shapes.
5. FKA twigs “Pendulum”
FKA twigs continues to carve out her place as one of the most singular pop artists of our time, with several epic videos in 2015. In fact, if you want the fully immersive video version of Tahliah Barnett this year, you should definitely checkout the musician’s 16 minute film “M3LL155X“. But, for this list we went with her video for “Pendulum“, off the critically acclaimed 2014 album LP1 (Young Turks). Teaming up with the London design team Academy Plus, Barnett directs, and of course stars in, this video which finds her partnering with Dave Rickman (aka WykD Dave), an expert practitioner of the Japanese style of rope bondage known as kinbaku/shibari. FKA twigs hangs by a complex web of black rope that seems to mirror her long braided hair. Rotating camera angles add to the surreal effect, as Barnett is eventually seen suspended above a liquid pool of mutating silver…
6. Shabazz Palaces “Forerunner Foray”
Chad VanGaalen‘s surreal animations have long been a favorite over here at Live Eye Tv, so it was great to see the prolific illustrator and animator, as well as musician, join Sub Pop labelmates Shabazz Palaces on this visual treat for SP’s “Forerunner Foray“. Animating a space age trip to Neptune and back in the blink of the third eye of Osiris, this artist’s singular illustrative abilities have always been demonstrated by his intricate, expressive lines and multi-varied forms. On this Afro-Futurist adventure, VanGaalen displays these skills with eye melting animations that tell a visual story with idiosyncratic style. Whatever, just watch the video!
7. Silicon “God Emoji”
Director Sam Peacocke joins fellow New Zealander Kody Nielson, aka Silicon, in this video for the multi-instrumentalist’s 2015 single, “God Emoji“(Weird World). Nielson plays drums and keys in a forested tableau under the cover of night, and when the hermetic vaper chooses not to go out on a Saturday night, he sends out his stoic-faced emoji instead! And you think Facebook’s a problem!
8. Oneohtrix Point Never “Sticky Drama”
Oneohtrix Point Never captures two slots on this year’s 10 Favorite‘s list, with a two-part film for Garden of Delete (Warp) track, “Sticky Drama“. Directed by the visual artist and essayist Jon Rafman, the video was inspired by Live Action Role Play, and stars a cast of over 35 children. Blending various quest narratives into a tangled mini-epic that includes elements from Garden of Delete‘s Ezra storyline, which if you’re just tuning in involves strange visitations from a street kid with a debilitating skin condition, “Sticky Drama” is a panoptical fever dream of crusading children, raging teens, and sentient goo…
9. Thug Entrancer “Curaga/Low-Life”
Animator Milton Melvin Croissant III took top video honors last year with his brilliant video for Thug Entrancer‘s “Death After Life I”. This year he delivered a trio of outstanding visuals with video’s for Chiffon’s “Baited”, Rubik’s “Duet”, as well as this new effort for Thug Entrancer’s “Curaga/Low-Life“. Really hard to pick a favorite here, as Milton continues to demonstrate he exists in a rarified realm of his own when it comes to image making. This year’s videos show a wide ranging visual style that includes, on the one side, “Duet”‘s Fantasia inspired animations, and, on the other, “Curaga/Low-Life”‘s monochromatic renderings of an alien battlecraft; but it’s Milton’s facility with the open source 3D graphics and animation software Blender that is the unifying element here–providing the artist with a free and powerful tool to realize his spectacular visions!
10. Torn Hawk “There Was a Time”
Torn Hawk‘s Luke Wyatt is a one man wrecking ball when it comes to his art making. Like some rugged individualist of old, setting out to stake his own claim in the gold laden hills of the Wild West, Wyatt goes it alone with solitary conviction and a steely jaw. In addition to the music he has made over the last several years for labels like Mexican Summer and Not Not Fun Records, Wyatt’s visual output has also been central to his practice. Honing a glitchy, VHS-driven aesthetic he calls “video mulch”, Wyatt told Pitchfork’s Andy Beta in 2014, “My videos aim to be statements of deep sincerity”. “There Was A Time” was created over the holidays of that year at Wyatt’s childhood home, and while all kinds of different media and visual detritus filter thru, Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s amazing 16th century painting “Hunters in the Snow”, a print of which hung in the musician’s bedroom as a kid, is featured prominently throughout.
