Chris Cunningham's Videos for Warp Records Were My Horrible Punk Rock

"Forget progress by proxy – land on your own moon. It's no longer about what they can achieve, out there on your behalf, but what we can experience… up here… and in our own time. It's called mental wealth."

My first, unwitting encounter with Chris Cunningham was the Playstation advert he created in 2003. I was in the dull wilderness of middle-class youth, in a remote part of Wales; starting to visit parties in the hills and the woods, exploring new highs and lows with a raggle-taggle bunch of people from the local communities. Everyone just wanted to lose it; to get high, to sit round a campfire or on a sofa till the next afternoon, by which time the atmosphere could get very weird. People were pretty odd back there away from the cities, and we were all jumbled up together.

The video, entitled 'Mental Wealth', featured a teenage girl whose face had an uncanny touch of manga, or sci-fi alien, delivering a Scots monologue totally irrelevant to the product in question. This "randomness factor" wasn't so common in TV advertising then, but back then the twenty-second sequence stuck out vividly and eerily from the hyperactive landscape of television marketing and drab TV programming.

It was the notorious video for Aphex Twin's 'Come to Daddy' that got me first, though. In the opening shots, thuggish tower blocks loom, glaring with their columns of eyes, the roving camera causing their huge mass to sidle alongside each other like vast spacecraft. An elderly woman, observed by entities hidden amongst the architecture, walks her dog amongst the refuse that makes up the landscape. The animal's stream of piss brings a wrecked television to undead life, the screen acting as host body for a demon whose elastic features flickeringly manifest as the mantra begins: "I… want… your… soul".

As this sinister lord emerges from a hunk of pale meat into corporeality, you're reminded of the way Francis Bacon twists the human figure into blank curls of flesh. This influence became more and more apparent as Cunningham continued to work with Richard D. James for Warp. In creating the coke-driven contortionist child that stars in 'Rubber Johnny', their next collaboration, Cunningham slapped and squashed parts of his own body against a pane of glass; in 'Flex', this preoccupation with the body strips away all other elements, like a sex scene in a void in some ancient, reptile time zone.

This style of direction wasn't trying to convey the positivity and euphoric movements of rave music. Gone was the La Haine-esque street photography, the Keith Haring-style images of dancers cutting shapes against day-glo backdrops. These visuals represented what had happened to dance music after the peak of the high. Ushering us into a paranoid, decayed urban territory populated by psychological disturbances, alien life-forms and grotesque motions was a young special effects wiz who appeared to be wrestling with the same demons that plagued Francis Bacon, HR Giger, David Lynch and JG Ballard in preceding generations. He's expressed his huge admiration for Lynch's Elephant Man, which may explain the recurrence of enlarged heads.

The first video Cunningham directed for Warp was for Autechre's 'Second Bad Vibel'. It contains a quasi-erotic adulation of technological constructions, influenced perhaps by JG Ballard's Crash, and almost certainly by Swiss artist HR Giger's rutting machine-landscapes and sordid industrial anatomy that saw him commissioned to design sets for the Alien franchise (Cunningham himself had been working on the set of Alien3, at the age of 17).

With its gangs of violent kids smashing up high-rise debris while wearing Richard D James masks, 'Come to Daddy' played on the idea of the sinister influence of music on young people, and spoke of a profound anxiety about urbanisation and technology, but it wasn't really about any of that.Cunningham's only goal was to immerse himself in these unprecedented new sounds and exploring where they took him – however dark that place might be. "I listen to a piece of music and really get inside it - let it suggest a little universe to create," he once said in a BBC interview. It was simple expressionism, based on the qualities of the tracks themselves.

There's continuity here with the music that Warp was putting out. In the earlier days of jungle and rave, kick drums would be made as heavy as possible so that you could feel the music in your chest, and the keen, high frequency percussion would slice through it and force you to dance. In the Autechre and Aphex Twin tracks Cunningham was setting to film, the souped-up strength of the drums is still there, and increasing in weight and harsh texture, but for an altogether different purpose – or rather, without one. This was as much about dancing as it was about expressing the technology and the ideas for their own sake; revelling in the twisted emotions that were sparked by the intersection of rave culture, and the rapidly evolving uses of computers in electronic music.

This made sense to me, like the weird doodles I'd make in school books or the violence-for-the-sake-of-it in my favourite films. That "golden era" of rave had nothing to do with me. For whatever reason, something about these horrendous noises and images excited me as a 15-year old. This was my punk, my heavy metal: dark, experimental and ugly. The other director of interest my friends and I watched, while smoking crap hash, was David Firth, creator of Devvo and Salad Fingers. The darkness was what we wanted. The fact that it seemed indigestible to most people made it all the better, imagining the reaction of older relatives who might be peering over our shoulders. It was anathema to the boring comfort of my quiet, privileged life. It was extreme.

I was attempting to absorb the entirety of the rave-driven mind-expansion years too late, stoned in my bedroom or stoned on the PC, trying to digest the extreme sensory experiences of this previously unthinkable drill 'n' bass snarl. The overdriven dystopian hell of the images did the trick. They became inseparable. Everything else I listened to by Richard D. James after 'Come to Daddy' seemed to only exist in relation to the sights in Cunningham's video, as if those were his death-filled features blasting that little old lady's face off. And that's exactly what Warp's music was doing: kicking the shit out of everyday reality.

You can follow Gwyn Thomas de Chroustchoff on Twitter here: @DJSpooks

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