Dan Black - SYMPHONIES

What this video is

Released in 2009 as the lead single from Dan Black's debut album UN on A&M/Polydor Records, 'Symphonies' arrived at a peak moment for UK indie-electro crossover culture. The track's construction — sampling the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra's cover of Jack Nitzsche's Starman theme from the John Carpenter film — embodied the era's appetite for high/low cultural collisions. The video's concept of stringing…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of UK Wonky Pop — the genre-blending movement mixing indie, electro, hip-hop, and pop — 'Symphonies' and its video represent the genre's cinephile, art-school sensibility at its most fully realized. The video's structural conceit of using film title sequences as a visual…

The director

Chic & Artistic is a Paris-based creative production company co-founded by Axel d'Harcourt. Drawing on combined backgrounds in graphic design, fine art, film, and music, the company has directed music videos for Dan Black, Kid Cudi, Dragonette, Alphabeat,…