Kelela - Blue Light

What this video is

Released November 2017 as a follow-up visual to Kelela's debut album Take Me Apart (Warp Records, October 2017), 'Blue Light' arrived during a watershed moment for avant-garde Black female artistry in electronic music. The video's surrealist body-horror imagery — hair as entrapment and liberation simultaneously — resonated within broader 2017 conversations around Black womanhood, vulnerability, and transformation.…

Why it matters

A defining artifact of mid-2010s Alt-R&B's art-video movement, 'Blue Light' demonstrates how Warp Records-era electronic soul artists weaponized the music video format as a conceptual art object. The VFX-driven surrealism and minimalist staging directly challenged the maximalism of mainstream R&B…

The director

Paris-born director and image maker, represented by production house DIVISION Paris (and later Mirror Mirror). Known for award-winning music videos spanning alt-R&B, electronic, and pop — including work for Rosalía, Kali Uchis, Rita Ora, Tiga, and Etienne de…