This time for WPD I decided not to write about something new and fresh, but about a video, and a videomaker, that everyone interested in this art should know. Chris Cunningham worked with artists like Björk, Madonna, Placebo, Portishead and Squarepusher among the others, but is during his collaboration with Aphex Twin that he created his greatest masterpieces.

The duo produced two music videos (the one you can see above and Windowlicker) and three video installations (Monkey Drummer, Rubber Johnny and Flex that unfortunately isn’t available in a full-lenght version neither online nor on DVD). They also toured together in 2005, you can see a not-so-good recording of their performance at Traffic Festival in Turin here.

Cunningham’s visual language is just like Richard D. James’s musical style: experimental, distorted and surreal. In this video he takes the recurrent element of Richard’s face to create a nightmare that come out from an abandoned television in three different forms: first there is the distorted face that sings “I want your soul, I will eat your soul,” then there are that creepy kids who come to kidnap the old woman and finally there is the “daddy.”

It should be no surprise knowing that this video was named the number one video of the 1990s by Pitchfork and was positioned number 35 in 100 Greatest Scary Moments, as voted by Channel 4 viewers in 2003.