Featuring Aphex Twin, Beyoncé, fka Twigs and more.

180 Studios' dedicated film space, The Underground Cinema, opened its first music-focused season, Sound & Vision, earlier this month, with an extensive programme spanning live performance, documentary portraits and cult classics.

Running alongside the main schedule, the adjacent exhibition space is presenting a rotating programme of iconic music videos by Romain Gavras, Melina Matsoukas, Kahlil Joseph, Jordan Hemingway, Anthony Mandler, Chris Cunningham, Dave Meyers, Spike Jonze and Gabriel Moses.Below, a closer look at the videos in the programme.

Below we dive into the programme which proves that music videos are as vital a medium as the songs they accompany.

Aphex Twin

Windowlicker (Chris Cunningham, 1999)

Twenty-seven years on, Chris Cunningham's video for Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" is still a queasy watch and a masterclass in uncanny valley from the king of electronic discomfort.

Released on Warp on 22 March 1999, "Windowlicker" was nominated for Best British Video at the 2000 Brit Awards. In the video, Cunningham multiplies Richard D. James's grin across a squad of Jameses grinding and dancing in the LA sun, the song's pornographic outro pushing the parody past mockery and into something stranger.

Built for the big screen with Cunningham's long takes and widescreen framing, "Windowlicker" set a high bar in satirising the male-gaze-led, over-sexualised music video while daring to challenge its audience.

Björk

It's Oh So Quiet (Spike Jonze, 1995)

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Back in 1995, four years before Being John Malkovich and almost two decades before Her, Spike Jonze directed this sugary, choreographed video for Björk's cover of the 1948 Hans Lang song popularised by Betty Hutton in 1951.

Shot in the San Fernando Valley, the video places Björk inside her own pastel musical world, moving from the garage out onto the street as mechanics, pedestrians and a tap-dancing letterbox fall into formation around her.

It's hard not to come away in high spirits: Jonze's joyously artificial set reflects the song's bombastic pastiche, and the whole thing meets Björk at her own self-contained delightfulness.

Lana Del Rey

Ride (Anthony Mandler, 2012)

Anthony Mandler's ten-minute short film for "Ride" is the fullest expression of Lana Del Rey's early aesthetic, and a Tumblr-era touchstone that's outlived the platform that canonised it. Framed by a spoken-word monologue from Del Rey herself, the video runs on the romantic Americana iconography that defined her first records: the Grand Canyon at its most melancholic, empty desert highways, biker gangs, older men.

An ode to living fast and dying young, "Ride" arrived in 2012 and anticipated, by nearly a decade, what Emmeline Clein would later name dissociative feminism, sketching a loose manifesto for the nihilistic, self-destructive women about to populate the next era of online culture.

Jamie xx

Gosh (Romain Gavras, 2016)

Shot in Tianducheng, an underpopulated Chinese town built to replicate Paris complete with its own Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées, Romain Gavras' video for "Gosh" pulls 400 students from the Xiaolong Martial Arts School into a breathtaking piece of choreography around protagonist Hassan Koné.

For a fairly minimalist track, the visuals for "Gosh" feel massive: drones pull back to reveal the production scale and the students move with the fluidity of an early '00s track visualiser, all of it captured without the assistance of CGI. A clear example of how a music video can make a song sound bigger than it does on record alone.

Beyoncé

Formation (Melina Matsoukas, 2016)

It's no overstatement to say that few music videos have arrived with as much impact as Beyoncé's "Formation". Released as a free single on Tidal the day before her 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance — three months before the Lemonade visual album it would lead — Melina Matsoukas's video landed in the cultural consciousness as both a political statement and a sharpening of Beyoncé's untouchable status, uniting millions around a music video at a time when the form was being declared dead.

Set in New Orleans but shot over two days in Los Angeles, "Formation" combines post-Katrina imagery, antebellum iconography reclaimed through Black ownership, and contemporary Black Southern life into a declarative work that set the tone for the wave of explicitly political mainstream pop that followed.

"Formation" won the Grammy for Best Music Video, six MTV VMAs including Video of the Year, and the inaugural Cannes Lions Music Grand Prix — making Matsoukas the first director ever to take that prize. In the years since, it's hard to think of a music video that's come close to its unifying reach.

Flying Lotus

Until the Quiet Comes (Kahlil Joseph, 2012)

For many viewers, "Until the Quiet Comes" was the entry point into Kahlil Joseph's work — the same Underground Cinema alumnus whose BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions opened this venue in February. The four-minute short, set to three tracks from Flying Lotus's fourth album, reimagines the Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts as a space where death and rebirth share the same frame: a boy is shot, leaves his body, and returns to dance.

It won the Short Film Special Jury Award at Sundance 2013 and travelled into the gallery the following year, when Kara Walker selected it for Ruffneck Constructivists at ICA Philadelphia. Joseph's collaboration with Flying Lotus has continued since — the producer's music threads through BLKNWS — but "Until the Quiet Comes" is where the partnership first found its footing.

Kendrick Lamar

HUMBLE. (Dave Meyers & The Little Homies, 2017)

Co-directed with The Little Homies (Kendrick Lamar and his longtime creative partner Dave Free), Dave Meyers's three-minute "HUMBLE." video gave the DAMN. era its defining iconography. The clip cycles Lamar through contexts at speed: a hair salon, a funeral, a bicycle, the head of a Last Supper tableau. The fish-eye close-up, the flaming head and the table itself were ubiquitous on social media at the time, each one working equally well as a static portrait of a rapper at his peak.

"HUMBLE." swept the 2017 VMAs, taking six including Video of the Year and Best Direction.

FKA twigs

Eusexua (Jordan Hemingway, 2024)

Pure wish-fulfilment for every overworked and underpaid office worker who's  danced their week away on a Friday night, twigs' "Eusexua" turns the mindless trance of office life at Cronecorp into a choreographed force of hedonism.

Directed by Jordan Hemingway, twigs' longtime collaborator, the video opens with twigs late to work before a supernatural wave hits the room and her colleagues snap into alien-like choreography. Packed with narrative, and simply put a load of fun, "Eusexua" is unbridled escapism.

Travis Scott

4x4 (Gabriel Moses, 2025)

The most recent video in the Sound & Vision programme, "4X4" announces its cinematic intentions by opening on a spoof of the Columbia Pictures ident before cycling through a sequence of set pieces taken straight from the movies: Scott performing in front of Prairie View A&M's Marching Storm on a football field, a wrestling bout, a rodeo, a police chase. The video switches between colour and black-and-white, pulling from Americana, hip-hop and band culture.

Gabriel Moses — the South London photographer and filmmaker whose Selah exhibition filled 180 Studios in 2025 — directs "4X4" in a way that feels expansive and gritty at once. The scale of certain scenes is impressive, but the vintage textures and the contrast between realism and fantasy are the perfect complement to hip-hop's tradition of carrying local life onto the world stage.

The Underground Cinema programme is running at 180 Studios. Full details here.

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