Dark strangelands in music videos

Despite an enormous interest in music from my early childhood, I didn’t grow up watching music videos. At home we had neither MTV nor any other music channel, so it was only when I was visiting friends that I could watch videos accompanying songs I was listening to. With the arrival of YouTube, I finally had a chance to fill the gaps in my limited music clip experience and so I would binge-watch them with the enthusiasm of a child exposed to sweets for the first time. As a result, I have seen tons of videos, but to be honest, there aren’t very many I remember. Just like film trailers, which are becoming more and more descriptive and generic, most music videos are made using a similar pattern, which features the band playing their instruments, often against some “dramatic” landscape. In an attempt to give the film some depth and intrigue, some vague characters and a lightly stitched plot are artificially added to what is essentially a recording of a live music. The thing is, if I want to see the band play, I will either go to their concert or watch a documentary based on a live performance. It is not what I seek in a music video. My favourite ones are those which either don’t feature the musicians at all, or they create a unique and surreal enough visual world for them to play and sing in, which makes the song more powerful and memorable. Having recently seen a superb video for Behemoth’s The Satanist, I decided to share a few particularly powerful music clips which have made a last impression on me.

1. Behemoth – The Satanist

Behemoth’s video is unique for many reasons. First of all, its director, Andrzej Dragan, is not only a filmmaker and photographer, but a physicist with a PhD in quantum physics, numerous awards and scholarships. The video is one of the first projects that came out of his movie production studio, Weird, established in 2014. The premiere production, Time Dilation, received the Golden Sword award for the best personal work at the KTR ad festival (2014) and Best in Show and Best CGI awards from Creative Review (2014). The music clip to The Satanist was shot in Warsaw and Starogard, a small city in western Poland where Dragan got fascinated by a subway passage next to the train station, particularly its tiled floor. The concept is based around the idea of a meeting point between the physical world and the underworld, which a young girl is drawn towards, as she stumbles in a faceless crowd down the streets of Warsaw. With (digitally) distorted facial features, she immediately brings to mind characters from Quay Brothers’ or David Lynch films. The latter is no coincidence, for