This is a release that has been a long time coming. A few years ago Warp started talking about releasing a DVD compilation of all their promotional videos and after a couple of Warp screening events in Europe, including Sonar 2003, it has finally seen the light of day. Some of you may remember the early 90s computer graphics that filled Warp’s Motion release (1994, VHS only) accompanied by music drawn from the Artificial Intelligence series – but its been a long time between drinks, curious especially for a label that has always released very ‘visual’ instrumental music, and had such a strong and lasting visual design aesthetic. Warp was waiting for a medium like DVD that could adequately capture the breadth and depth of their output. What appears on Warp Vision is a detailed chronicle of their music videos, much like the recently released Ninja Tune video compilation. However unlike the Ninja Tune compile, Warp has commissioned some of the most lauded and interesting music videos of the last decade all of which appear here. Of the most well know there are the story-form clips - Chris Cunningham’s incredible Aphex Twin double, Windowlicker and Come To Daddy, and Squarepusher’s Come On My Selector, and Daniel Levi’s clip for LFO’s Freak all appear in their longest unedited versions. Alex Rutterford’s intricate CGI work on Autechre’s Gantz Graf leads the animated clips along with the excellent stop motion work from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker (“he was the only person we knew who could do video”) on Aphex Twin’s beautiful On. Of the others – there are 32 in total – there are some groundbreaking clips from Lynn Fox, Pleix, Carlos Arias and promo work from Designers Republic. In a world where music videos generally tend to be short-lived phenomena quickly discarded to the waste lots of uninspired cultural refuse, a large number of the Warp videos here surpass their ‘use-value’ as promotional tools and become important milestones in modern visual culture.
Sebastian Chan |
