Watch Our 25 Favorite Music Videos Of 2016

Watch Our 25 Favorite Music Videos Of 2016

Continuing with our countdown of great music from the past year, today we take a look at our 25 Favorite Music Videos of 2016. Often reflecting back to us our unease with current social and political conditions, we saw important work from Maurice Mikkers, crystallizing Takami Nakamoto‘s actual tears for a dead friend into “Where Is Mawt“, the London-based video team Werkflow, rendering a virtual world into a hyper-real apocalyptic scenario for patten’s “Epsilon“, or ACVilla, documenting her travels across the lower forty-eight during this year’s election cycle for Thollem‘s “Assorted Flavors“–to name just a few from the selections here. In addition, the year brought back Jenny Hval, Ty Segall, Death Grips, Clipping., and Aphex Twin, artists who always seem to feature eye catching music videos. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Favorite Music Video list without work from Milton Melvin Croissant III–who show’s up twice this year with a video for Thug Entrancer‘s “Ronin”, as well adding animation to Logan Takahashi‘s “Rekr”. Heck, in the future, we’re just gonna have to call this award The Croissant…

25. TOBACCO “Dimensional Hum”
TOBACCO‘s “Dimensional Hum” was off his grimy and psychedelic LP Sweatbox Dynasty out this year on Ghostly International. Directed by Abe Dubin of the skateboarding collective Fancy Lad, the glitchy, lo-fi visuals follow a Weird Wig wearing protagonist as he shreds around town. The Surveillance State is in full effect as our skateboarder garners the ire of Corporate Security–while pink slime oozes in the gutter. Warped and wonderful, the video is a perfect match for “Dimensional Hum”‘s earful of weirdness.

24. METZ “Eraser”
METZ released “Eraser” back in January on a 7″ via Three One G. The video for the ear-scraping track was directed by the artist/musician Nathan Lee Joyner. He uses seizure inducing, twitched out visuals, and a shadowy plot line that hints at carbon monoxide poisoning, to deliver an eerie and abstracted video that is right in keeping with this cut’s sonic gut-punch.

23. Avalon Emerson “Natural Impasse”
“Natural Impasse” was off Avalon Emerson‘s Narcissus In Retrograde EP, out this year on Ghostly International. She also directed the video for the track, and in discussing her working method for the visuals with Resident Advisor recently, she explained:

“All of the clips are from my personal phone video archive taken over the last half a year or so. I trimmed each video, turned them into gifs, and processed them into various emojisaic gifs using a ruby script created by my friend Lucas Mathis (github: @lilkraftwerk); then edited them all together using Adobe Premiere–a process that took me about two months”.

While the resulting video uses a heavy dose of effects, and is often viewed through a prismatic veil of emojis, the personal footage culled from her phone archive makes for an intimate portrait of this jet-setting producer and DJ.

22. Takami Nakamoto “Where Is Mawt”
“Where Is Mawt” is an extraordinary video collaboration between the architect/musician Takami Nakamoto and the filmmaker Maurice Mikkers. Mikkers reports that the musician contacted him via email on April 16th to report that his friend Mathieu Trudel, a Canadian illustrator and animator had gone missing and that family and friends feared the worst. These fears were confirmed in May when the 37-year old’s body was found on Petrie Island in Ontario, Canada, the result of an apparent suicide. Recognizing the parallels between Nakamoto’s grief and his own “Imaginarium of Tears” project, the pair met immediately in The Hague to begin discussing this audio/visual collaboration. Using Mikkers film work with the Nikon Diaphot TMD microscope as their basis, the two set about capturing to video the crystallization of Nakamoto’s tears. More than just a metaphor, Mikkers explains,

“Over time Takami shed 2 to 3ml of tears in total that were then stored in Eppendorf reaction tubes. Small drops (1 to 5mm) were placed on several microscopic slides. These slides were then placed directly under the microscope and recordings were made while the crystallization process took place (between 5 and 30 minutes). We made more than 50 recordings. The tears could only be used for a small period of time (max 2 hours), it was necessary for Takami to “produce” more tears once the reaction tube was empty or when we exceeded the time period of 2 hours”.

Shot on a Canon 5D using a dark field illumination technique, the resulting images seem to pulse in forward and backward motion–before finally coalescing into feathered filigree by the video’s end. Combined with Nakamoto’s stuttering and sublimated electronics, “Where Is Mawt” is an amazingly moving tribute to a lost friend.

21. Protovulcan “What’s Your Flavour?”
“What’s Your Flavour?” is off Protovulcan‘s 2015 LP Stakes Is Low, but the track received this excellent video treatment this past November. Directed by Andy Ramsey, the visuals were filmed over two days at The Chicago Electric Piano Co.–a resource for the servicing of Rhodes, Wurlitzers, Hohner Clavinets, as well as other vintage keyboards and synthesizers. Ramsey and crew opt for a stylized performance video to capture the duo’s frenetic activity and they accomplish this with highly energized shots, rhythmic editing, and a host of eye-catching effects–including, what the band calls, a “trippy, psychedelic 60’s lightboard that flashes the actual notes as they are actually played”.

20. NAVVI “Close”
Seattle electronic duo NAVVI released their Hush Hush Records‘ debut Omni this past May. The video for “Close” came out in July and was self-directed by the band’s Brad Boettger and Kristin Henry. The sleek visuals star the two, while often making excellent use of a triptych split screen and abstracted perspectives. Gorgeously realized night footage of the Emerald City creates the feeling of a vast, impersonal urban expanse, and the pair adds a sense of mystery by sometimes flipping the perspective or dividing it between three screens. Coupled with evocative close-ups of Henry and Boettger, “Close” depicts a sense of longing and frigid emotional distances that can’t be spanned.

19. Thollem “Assorted Flavors”
Experimental musician Thollem McDonas and photographer/videographer ACVilla began traveling the lower 48 states in March of this year for their Who Are U.S. audio/visual project–documenting the nation’s tense political climate. We ended up featuring several videos from the series including “Assorted Flavors“. From a visual perspective, what really stands out here is ACVilla’s facility for “musical” editing. Her vibrant, often run-and-gun footage, is expertly matched to Thollem’s strangely nuanced sonic output. The video opens with quickly paced imagery that is often sped up and it follows the keyboardist’s baroque barrage of organ notes in a distinctly rhythmic way. At the same time, the videographer uses her own camera pans and movement to echo Thollem’s hairpin compositional turns, while providing the perfect visual compliment to the “Assorted Flavors” American’s come in.

18. Marissa Nadler “All the Colors of the Dark”
Marissa Nadler directed a gorgeous video for her track “All the Colors of the Dark“, off her LP Strangers out this past May on Sacred Bones. Inspired by the “beautiful phantasmagoric worlds” of The Brothers Quay, Francesca Woodman, Jan Švankmajer, and others, Nadler uses the intimate confines of her home to create a lovely stop-motion homage to the filmmakers she loves. In discussing “All the Colors of the Dark”, she explains:

“In the video, everyday objects move on their own, representing a lingering presence in my life…Little by little, throughout the course of the song and video, the leaves and vines are pushed back into the drawers as time slowly creeps by. I rearrange the photos on the wall that have inexplicably moved, and among other things, shut the windows and blinds that keep opening by themselves. With each spin of the trees, seasons pass, and I pace around the house.”

Haunted by this lingering presence, be it “memory” or “true apparition”, it’s spell is finally broken, or as Nadler says, “With the death of the figure at the end of the video, that presence is vaporized.”

17. Krankland “In the Realms of the Unreal”
Belgian guitarist/vocalist Thomas Werbrouck launched his new project Krankland this year. Thomas first came to our attention playing with Eline Adam in the punk-leaning noise-pop band Little Trouble Kids, and the duo’s excellent stop-motion video for “Medals & Scars”–all hand drawn by Adam–was one of our favorites of 2014. For Krankland, Werbrouck is joined by Christophe Claeys on drums, Thomas Mortier on bass, and Janko Beckers on guitar. The video for “In the Realms of the Unreal” featured re-purposed vintage footage taken from several psychedelically styled commercials–in particular, a really cool animated sequence featuring some kind of “magic man” capable of bestowing “fashion” on a flock of his wanna-be followers! Live Eye Tv caught up with Thomas earlier this fall to discuss Krankland and you can read the interview here.

16. Oozing Wound “Diver”
Video director Joe Martinez Jr., and the folks at Mudwing Media, returned to work with the Chicago-based trio Oozing Wound on this video for “Diver“–off the band’s 2016 LP Whatever Forever (Thrill Jockey). Clearly showing the dangers of scoring bootlegged OW on the streets, being addicted to thrash is obviously a full-time job. The need to shred can start innocently enough, and Fanboy, the video’s “star”, probably never thought he’d get hooked. But the quality of OW, even when bootlegged, is so high these days heshers are dropping like flies. Now here’s the thing, in a city as notoriously corrupt as Chicago, you might cop something like OW’s Live at Thalia Hall DVD in some back alley, but you know, as soon as your plugged in and ready to mainline this eye candy, the Cook County Entertainment Tax Enforcer is gonna come looking for his cut. Before you know it, your getting it from both sides. You gotta shred to live, but what you have to pay The Man just to do so, will put you in the grave!

15. Jenny Hval “Female Vampire”
Norwegian musician/writer Jenny Hval followed up last year’s excellent Sacred Bones‘ debut, Apocalypse Girl, with her Blood Bitch LP this past September. The video for “Female Vampire” was directed by artist/musician Jenny Berger Myhre, who also collaborated on Hval’s beautifully weird video for “Sabbath“–off last year’s record. This newest visual offering continues to explore femininity in challenging ways with Hval reporting via Facebook that the video was filmed in her “Oslo hood”, and that it featured:

“Oslo’s best kept secrets: Orfee Schuijt, Anja Lauvdal, Heiða Karine Jóhannesdóttir Mobeck, Ingrid Haakstad, Sigrid Marie Kittelsaa Vesaas, Marianne Skjeldal & yours truly”.

Complex and nuanced aspects of femininity are explored in Hval’s music, and Myhre’s imagery follows suit as the singer and her posse seem to alternately embody the power of sisterhood, as well as its’ darker emotional aspects. Central to the video for “Female Vampire” is the haunting image of women who seem to be joined at the cheeks by their sticky, peeling skin–which they later pull from their faces and offer to the camera. The metaphoric implications are devastating, and they are echoed in the closing shots when close-ups of these women’s faces are viewed thru a chain link fence–the organic beauty of skin contrasted by the fence’s cold metal. Plenty of powerful “food for thought” here!

14. DJ Taye “Burnin Ya Boa (feat. DJ Manny)”
DJ Taye‘s 4-song EP Move Out came out this past November via Hyperdub Records–along with this video for the record’s lead track, “Burnin Ya Boa (feat. DJ Manny)“. Directed by Desmond Penn, the visuals feature Taye, with friends DJ Manny and Jalen, showing off some nifty footwork moves. If you’re keeping score at home that’s Taye in the Chi-Town Jacket, DJ Manny sporting a dope Teklife coat with Japanese logo, and Jalen’s wearing the Teklife hoodie. Penn follows the crew around town from the ‘hood all the way down to the Loop, where the trio breaks it down in front of Alexander Calder‘s iconic Flamingo statue. Now, that’s how you get around town!

13. Aphex Twin “CIRKLON3”
“CIRKLON3 [ Колхозная mix ]” was off Aphex Twin‘s Cheetah EP, out this past July on Warp Records. The video was Richard D. James‘ first visual offering in 17 years, and while his work with director Chris Cunningham on videos like “Window Licker” and “Come to Daddy” have become legendary, now you can add the name Ryan Wyer to the list of Apex Twin auteurs who have brought us unforgettable and smile-inducing work. James found Wyer, a 12-year old video director from Dublin, on YouTube–and one can only imagine the rabbit hole he must have been tumbling down when he landed on the channel epic1:40d Gaming. Fortunately, he found a kindred soul in Wyer, who stars here with other family members and kids from the neighborhood. Comfortable just being himself, the young videomaker’s style is effortless as he leads his posse thru dance moves, chills on the beach, or just generally goofs about–mostly while wearing that madly grinning Richard D. James mask. A great reminder that Aphex Twin’s music has always come from a place of child-like glee, and that “play” is central to his creative method!

12. Death Grips “Eh”
Death Grips video for “Eh“, off their 2016 release Bottomless Pit, was directed by South African photographer/filmmaker Sean Metelerkamp. Also featuring eye-melting post-production from Christopher Bisset, the visuals star rapper MC Ride and some curiously masked characters running amuck. Rendering their physical forms as three dimensional bands of digitally colored light makes for some creepy humans here, as well as some intriguingly glitched viewing.

11. Andy Stott “Butterflies”
The Manchester-based producer Andy Stott followed up his stellar 2014 LP Faith in Strangers with 2016’s, Too Many Voices–out this past April via Modern Love. “Butterflies” was the album’s first single and the video for the track was filmed by Michael England. Set in the late night streets of NYC, and featuring movement and dance from Rafael Chinx Martin, Stott’s crepuscular House provides the perfect soundtrack for an exhilarating tour of the midnight metropolis–complete with sleepy commuters, carousing nuns, and late night weirdos.

10. The Range “Five Four”
NY-based musician and producer The Range released his Potential LP on March 25th via Domino. The effort found James Hinton exploring his love for early UK grime and electronica, and it joins his dynamic compositions with emcees he discovered while exploring off-the-beaten path on YouTube. “Five Four” features the London-based grime vocalists Ophqi and Super Thought, who also star in this video for the track directed by Daniel Kaufman. Appearing as ambassadors, Ophqi and Super Thought led us on an intimate tour through their neighborhood, giving us a glimpse into the everyday realities that inform their lyrics.

9. Logan Takahashi “Rekr”
Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s happening in Logan Takahashi‘s video for “Rekr“. Directed by Theo Anthony, and featuring VFX from one of our favorite animators, Milton Melvin Croissant III, this video’s complex imagery sets the thread of a storyline inside abstracted and surreal footage. Using captioned snippets of conversation, and a nebulous ring of characters engaged in equally opaque activities, “Rekr”‘s protagonists seem to be carrying out some covert plot. But what it involves, and to what ends, are buried in a dream-like mystery with Croissant’s animating ectoplasm and strangely sentient objects creating a world of blurred boundaries where general ontological assumptions like ‘real’/’fake’, ‘analog’/’digital’–or, as Takahashi puts it, ‘technology’/’organic’–no longer seem applicable. If so, the future promises to be an increasingly uncanny experience!

8. Exploded View “Orlando”
Annika Henderson‘s Exploded View project released their self-titled debut on August 19th via Sacred Bones. The band’s video for the track “Orlando” came with a powerful and important message from the group that read:

“The song “Orlando” was written at the end of 2014, and its video was completed shortly before the terrible events in Orlando, FL, in the early hours of June 12th, when the most deadly mass shooting in the United States shook the country, the world and the queer community to its core, as the targets were clearly chosen, simply for being who they were, conducted in a space that has traditionally been one of protection, a safe haven for the queer community for decades: the dance floor.

Quoting from Virginia Woolf’s iconic novel Orlando: a Biography (1928), “Life, it sings, or croons rather, like a kettle on a hob, Life, life what art thou?”, as the main character has become a symbol to all those who believe they can free themselves from the restrictions imposed on our bodies, on our freedoms, to or from; the song is a celebration of life’s simple pleasures; of union in our differences. In the wake of our pain, when some have downplayed the chosen identity of the victims, while others may have concentrated solely on that, it is important to remember that this affects all of us. Whatever happens, dance floors should continue to be a space for freedom of expression, for life’s simple pleasures and a safe haven for so many communities around the world”.

7. Ty Segall “California Hills”
Before California dries up into a desert or crumbles into the ocean, who better than Ty Segall to point out the noxious cloud around its gilded dream! On “Californian Hills“, Segall informs us that the Golden State is where Western Civilization has come to die, so pull up a seat, grab some popcorn, and enjoy the show. Super-fine animated visuals here from Meghan Tryon and Garrett Davis feature a blitzed-out clown trying to earn his “get out of jail free card”, and it’s quite the interdimensional ride. You can find this track on Ty Segall’s Emotional Mugger LP, out now on Drag City.

6. Clipping. “Air ‘Em Out”
The LA rap trio Clipping. released great videos for their tracks “Shooter” and “Wriggle”–but it was the visuals for “Air ‘Em Out“, off the band’s dystopian concept album Splendor and Misery (Sub Pop/Deathbomb Arc)–that really caught our eyes. Director Carlos Lopez Estrada returns (“Work Work,” “Inside Out”) to work with the group and he delivered this unsettling concept video starring Clipping.’s rapper, Daveed Diggs. Estrada explains:

“I met with Clipping. a few months ago to talk about potential ideas for this video and Jonathan (Snipes) half jokingly said that we should put Daveed in zero gravity. I emailed them back a few days later saying, “I know you were kidding, but what if we do?” We then embarked on a wonderful creative journey of scrappy visual effect techniques and ended up with our own janky version of zero gravity..”

Diggs, who starred in the Hamilton Musical, has the kind of captivating presence that is hard to take your eyes off of. Combining tight wire verbal acumen with a theatrical sense for the dramatic, “Air ‘Em Out” finds him guzzling pills and struggling to cope with the perceptual consequences, while selective gravity seems to take over all around him.

5. patten “Epsilon”
The video for patten‘s cut “Epsilon“, the title track to the duo’s 2016 Warp Records’ release, was directed by the London-based video team Werkflow. The label reported that the CG visuals were “shot, edited and rendered” using a “games engine cut-scene editor, with figure visualization realized through collaboration with Sheffield’s Ten24, who produced the photogrammetry, and Cubic Motion, who captured the facial performance”. Staring a computer generated heroine on a desolate train ride thru an apocalyptic city, the striking visuals start from a close-up on the character’s eye, before drawing back to reveal this nightmarish scenario. The realistic detail of this initial shot is confounding because as the camera pans backward the viewer might be surprised to learn these hyper-real details are in fact animated. Presented in one long take, the camera’s viewpoint eventually falls off “Epsilon”‘s protagonist and we see her train car apparently coming apart–before the camera pans back to show her in relief against an exploding city-line.

4. Douglas Dare “New York”
Douglas Dare‘s brilliant animated video for his track “New York“, off the musician’s Aforger LP (Erased Tapes) was directed and animated by London’s Dan Jacobs. Discussing the video, Jacobs explained:

“The idea of alternate/parallel realities is something I have always enjoyed exploring in my work, and there was a big cross over with the themes Douglas was exploring on his new record and particularly the track “New York”. Working in 3D enabled us to stick very close to the original ideas behind the track – the idea of a fragmented/distorted or romanticized memory of a place, and being unable to distinguish between what was real and what is imaginary…”

Douglas Dare’s intimate style bared all on Aforger and “New York” was no exception. Representing the apex of a relationship with his lover, Dare offered:

“I think New York can be thought of as this fabricated, magical place. I was there with my boyfriend after touring the U.S., but when I came back to London I discovered all these lies and began questioning everything. I even questioned whether New York actually happened or not. New York is a song that’s literally describing that very real feeling of not knowing who or what to believe anymore – scary and magical at the same time”.

3. Shabazz Palaces “Dawn in Luxor”
Shabazz Palaces released a mind-blowing video for their track “Dawn in Luxor” this year, though the track is off the duo’s highly lauded 2014 LP Lese Majesty (Sub Pop). Directed by Stephan Gray, and featuring imagery obtained thru the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, as well as from the Hubble & Cassini missions, the video montages achingly beautiful footage of earth and space. Seamless editing and VFX tweak the imagery in surreal ways, often making the Earth look like some unfamiliar and distant planet, or the site of an alien visitation. But, “Dawn in Luxor” really offers a panoptical vision, giving us the chance to view life–and the forces of nature–at the molecular, terrestrial and cosmic levels.

2. Thug Entrancer “Ronin”
Thug Entrancer released his 2xLP Arcology this past March 4th via Software and it’s one of our favorite records of 2016. Talking about the album, Ryan McRyhew explained: “The album title stems from the idea of a structure or object that is entirely self-sufficient and life-generating with little to no outside influence”. While that might also be a metaphor for a record that was “created in isolation”, McRyhew added that he spent a lot of time discussing the concept with visual artist and longtime friend, Milton Melvin Croissant III–who designed the album’s cover, videos, and visuals for Thug Entrancer’s live festival performances in Europe. Milton’s animated work for the track “Ronin” re-introduced us to Arcology‘s world of gleaming monochromatics–after last year’s favorites, “Curaga” and “Low-Life”; and while those featured an eerily empty alien craft floating through space, this time there’s a promising show of biomorphic lifeforms raving their faces off!

1. Jamie xx “Gosh”
Director Romain Gavras does a remarkable job with these visuals for the Jamie xx track, “Gosh“–off the producer’s 2015 LP In Colour (Young Turks). Filmed in the Chinese city Tianducheng, a surreal replica of the director’s native city, Paris, the video also stars the striking Parisian street-cast actor Hassan Kone–a 17-year old with albinism. Featuring an extravagant cast of characters, including three hundred odd Chinese kids with their hair dyed blond, as well as a group of Chinese albinos the director met through Facebook, Gavras’ audacious vision was accomplished without CGI. That’s hard to believe when you watch some of these amazing scenes, like the shot of Kone on a high rise balcony with a figure seemingly standing in every window of the immense building, or the ritual-like motion of hundreds of kids around the actor under a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Gavras proves that he sure knows how to take meta to the meta level!