Nightmares On Wax - Shape The Future

What this video is

Released in January 2018, 'Shape The Future' arrived as Nightmares On Wax's first studio album in nearly five years, representing a mature summation of George Evelyn's 25+ year career as a cornerstone of the Warp Records roster. The video's choice of RUFFMERCY as director aligned the release firmly within a mid-2010s to late-2010s underground electronic and hip-hop visual language that prized hand-crafted animation…

Why it matters

Represents a landmark intersection of UK downtempo/trip-hop electronic soul and the animated music video avant-garde. The video crystallises how Warp Records-aligned artists employed non-mainstream visual idioms — specifically RUFFMERCY's gestural animation — to communicate genre identity and…

The director

RUFFMERCY, aka Russ Murphy, is a Bristol-based animation director and visual artist. He studied Illustration at Leeds Metropolitan University and began his career making on-air promos and title sequences at MTV Europe in the late 1990s. Around 2011 he…