Outside the music mainstream, a rich ecosystem of independent artists and filmmakers collaborate to create an array of fun and fresh visual surprises. Stash makes a point of hunting down and collecting the most intriguing of these.

Here are six of our favorite music videos published in The Stash Permanent Collection during 2018 and listed here in chronological order from the date of publication.
 
 

JAMES VINCENT McMORROW “NATIONAL”
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Jay Grandin, CD at Giant Ant in Vancouver: “We were given an open brief to create an animated video for the song ‘National’ off of James Vincent McMorrow’s fourth album True Care’.

“The biggest challenge was to create a story that reflected the mood of the song without following the lyrics faithfully. We wanted to create a story that allowed people an on-ramp to their own emotional experiences and which didn’t belong to James alone.”
 
 

NIGHTMARES ON WAX ‘SHAPE THE FUTURE’
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Director Russ Murphy (aka Ruffmercy) in Bristol, UK: “James Burton from Warp records, George (aka Nightmares on Wax) and Kazim (NOW management) wanted the video to feel at one with the other elements in the campaign I designed, and also to feature a performance from George.

“I wrote the idea that the character would be following himself over and over in a continuous loop and towards the end of the video he breaks with the power of positive thought.”
 
 

THE WEEKND “CALL OUT MY NAME”
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David Lawson, VFX supervisor at The Mill: “We were first presented with a great treatment deck from the director Grant Singer. As soon as we saw it and discussed his vision with him, we knew this was a project we wanted to be involved in.

“The biggest creative challenge for me was the fully CG shot of the camera flying toward the building at the end of the video. The sheer length of the shot, as well as the amount of resolution required to go from so far out to so close in, made for a fun and complex task.”
 
 

COACH HOP “I LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT”
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Laurence Honderick and The Dink (AKA Sam Humphries): “We loved this song and had each wanted to do something massively ambitious over which we had complete creative ownership, so we offered to create a music video for free on the condition that we could approach the project whatever way we liked.

“Because we had no clients or other stakeholders, the only questions we were ever faced with were along the lines of ‘How do we make this or that moment bigger or better?'”
 
 

MAX COOPER “RULE 110”
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Director Raven Kwok in Long Beach California: “The Rule 110 algorithm reveals fundamental aesthetics of a thinking machine, and is one chapter from the story of One Hundred Billion Sparks, an audio-visual project about the mind.

“I have a childhood love of 80’s synth music, so when I decided to use Wolfram’s cellular automata Rule 110 to tell part of the visual story, I immediately thought of big gated-reverb snares and classic synths, because the system spits out something akin to Tetris.”
 
 

SAMI FITZ “DEAD BIRDS”
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Ben Collier-Marsh, creative director and animator in London: “This project is part of a series of music videos we are producing with Sami and follows on from ‘Wide Open Sky’.

“The brief was completely open. The challenge was putting this project down to work on our live commercial projects, simply because this music video was such a pleasure to construct and allowed us creative freedom.

“The challenge was knowing when enough is enough. We created a collection of experiments to feature in the video and choosing which ones worked most effectively was difficult.”