“The strange worlds created by Chris Cunningham in his work stem partly from his early career, which included drawing Judge Dredd for the 2000AD comic and doing animatronics for Ridley Scott on the Alien films. So it’s unsurprising that his imagination has generated a world of the digital grotesque. And for this reason, the pleasure of watching Windowlicker doesn’t depend on knowing the forms that he is apparently parodying. It only works precisely because it is neither pastiche nor parody. With Windowlicker, Cunningham has created something new and original in itself. As he remarks himself, any casual viewer of the video will be quickly disabused of the thought that it is an R’n’B video.

As Aphex Twin himself won’t appear in the videos, Cunningham makes a virtue of this by putting his face on almost everyone. And the Aphex Twin videos take their cues as much from the music as from anything else. The gross visual metamorphoses in Come To Daddy and Windowlicker have their impetus in the Aphex Twin’s digitally dissolving sounds. The only truly scary thing about the video is the reaction to it. Like the fools in Windowlicker who spend too much time talking, we live in a culture of oversignification, where anything becomes a sign of something else, of something we already know. And the consequence is that we don’t recognise and miss the excitement of the truly new.” — John O’Reilly

• Aphex Twin – Windowlicker

https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,,313437,00.html