On the other side of the television, I recall seeing this video on MTV's electronic music video show AMP that year, and really liking it. Its visuals - a faceless alien in some underground tunnel, dark fluorescent lights, and surveillance footage of a robot/machine transforming - were sinister and technologically paranoid. It wasn't an amazing video, but most of the other videos on AMP felt similarly low-budget. The fact that such music and videos were actually on national television provided some vindication and assurance that things were okay in the world. Sure, the first minute of the video could easily be replaced without harm, but that hardly mattered because the song was so good.
Now that Chris Cunningham is who he is, it's hard not to feel disappointed with both the original version of the video and Chris' re-edit, released in 2002. Chris says in the Directors Label book that he was "trying to build this chunk of non-specific industrial machinery that would come apart in time to the music. So I built this model in my back garden and got all these pieces of machinery and stuff and ended up filming them." Given Chris' current body of work, and comparing Alex Rutterford's Gantz Graf video for Autechre, one can easily imagine how this would look.
Turning back to the first version, you can tell. The editing is sometimes incoherent, and the visuals don't impact you like Chris' later work. The second version is tight and mechanical, but you can sense that there's not enough footage to work with.
But hell, the first version of this site always gave me a hint of disappointment.
Watch the video here at sputnik7.com.
You can find the original version of Second Bad Vilbel on Warp's 2004 video compilation WarpVision - The Videos 1989-2004. The second version is available on Chris' Directors Label DVD, and on Autechre's Gantz Graf CD/DVD.
