Sound And Vision: Aidan Zamiri
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at selected music videos by Aidan Zamiri.
Aidan Zamiri named his first feature film The Moment. In this mockumentary, based on Charli XCX's Brat album- and tour-role-out, the notion of being an 'it'-person and being culturally relevant becomes bleakly comical and quietly unnerving. The idea that you, as a person, could come to be described as 'the moment', an ethereal disembodied notion signifying imminent death, is enough to send Charli XCX spiraling. Cultural cachet and relevance is what happens to be the name of the game for Aidan Zamiri, who himself could be described as an 'it'-person and who has turned his directorial fame as a music video directing, in a bit of a viral moment himself.
During the press roll out of The Moment, Charli XCX, thé popstar of 2025, and Aidan Zamiri, the director of the death-knell of BRAT, worked as a tandem, showing up in all sorts of viral videos. Their friendship in these videos seems genuine, but with both XCX and Zamiri you would never know for sure: everything they both do is steeped in irony, yet also seems achingly sincere. It's this dichotomy that The Moment builds upon.
Speaking of 'the moment' as a concept; nobody would know more about capturing the moment, a fleeting part of time in amber, than a photographer. This is in fact how Zamiri started out, as a fashion photographer, an origin which we can still see some remnants of in his first music video ever, for Raye and Young Adz's All My Love, in which the lead singer (Raye) flaunts her beautiful gowns for the camera. Zamiri brings in a conceptual twist, when Young Adz in a metatextual framing story, fails to show up to the set, leaving Raye to stand-in for him in her best male drag persona. It is a built-in meme moment, something Zamiri builds into all his music video work.
See for example So When You Gonna, by Dream Wife, in which the camera is quite literally placed into someone's mouth, having the whole music video framed by a set of teeth, with a POV from the tongue's angle. It's weird, it's off-putting, it's funny. Equally weird is his music video for 645AR's Sum Bout U, featuring FKA Twigs (see below), in which the chipmunk vocalled singer coos to the object of his affection, FKA Twigs, who features as an only-fans model.
If Zamiri knows one thing well it is internet culture, something that has eluded many a modern director. It's hard to capture the thorny, ever-evolving nature of the internet and meme culture, but Zamiri does it well. This might be why he became the muse for FKA Twigs' mixtape Caprisongs, which was itself a referential mish-mash of so many varied (musical) sources, that the only fitting way to depict it was via a music video album. One in which every aspect of then current internet culture and viral videos was used to depict the ever shifting nature of FKA Twigs sound. See for example sampled below the music video for Ride The Dragon, which uses viral street flash mob videos, illegally shot street footage and Tik Tok dances as sources of visual inspiration.
This mix between sincere immediacy and detached irony, sometimes is brought to the point of borderline incoherence, like in Jockstrap's Greatest Hits, which tells a story of aging artists in a court-room in a mish-mash of styles that feels whiplash-inducing yet exhilarating. Or check out Tiberius B's HHB, which makes beauty out of a scatalogical use of piss-puddles as time-and-space-warping portals. It's as off-putting and head-scratchingly weird as that sounds, but also oddly beautiful and poetic.
This might be why Zamiri was asked to do branding campaigns for a lot of artist, including the widely-mocked-and-lauded Marty Supreme roll-out surrounding Timothée Chalamet, that resulted in both cultural cachet for the actor ánd a backlash. It is this ever-fickle nature of branding and the internet that The Moment builds upon, but the whole start of BRAT as branding is all Aidan Zamiri too. Thé first big viral BRAT-moment, where Charli XCX felt undeniable, going from your favorite it-girl to mainstream popstar was with Zamiri's music video for 360 (see below). That video opens with a whopper of a 2-minute comedy skit, all about what being an it-girl is about. It's drenched in irony, detached from any sense of reality and sincerity, but also funny, irreverent and plain fun. Everything that happens after that skit seems like it's building from viral moment to viral moment. From Charli spilling wine on her outfit, to her girating on an elderly man dying on a hospital slab; from the star-studded cameo-line-up including Chloe fucking Sevigny, to a literal pile-up of car crashes and the breaking of a (fourth) wall.... The video is wild.
Equally wild is his video for Guess(also below), the second big viral visual moment for Brat, which was the first sign that a remix album was about to be released. Zamiri would work with guest star Billie Eilish again on her Birds of a Feather, a slightly more subdued affair than Guess' literal trash-heap of thongs.
The Moment builds upon Brat's marketing cycle, which Zamiri helped in part build, and burns it to the ground, showing the fear behind the irony, the loneliness behind the fame, the cringe comedy behind the ha-ha-funny. The Moment feels like Kristoffer Borgli is directing Charli XCX's This is Spinal Tap with Gaspar Noé as a DOP. It's that wild and uncomfortable. It wants to see the world burn, born from a sense of discomfort with fame, but at the same time wallowing in it and trying to extend it. The same nightmarish pursuit of extending the moment of flashing out before cultural death, is visible as well in the last video Zamiri made for the album cycle. For the soundtrack of The Moment Charli XCX's longtime producer A.G. Cook took over the duties of building the sonical framework. Zamiri directed a video for the soundtrack-cut Residue (finally below), which could be subtitled The death of Brat. In it we follow Charli down liminal spaces, long dark hallways, that get filled more and more with XCX's lookalikes. This army of clones eventually gathers in a strobe-filled room in which the death-knell of BRAT is shown on screens, basically calling The Moment the beating of a dead horse. The moment is over. All this happens while the XCX-bots are, what only can be described as, threateningly twerking.
When the lights die down, we finally see the rebirth of Charli, as Kylie Jenner. It's a built-in viral moment, forged through the friendship Zamiri has with Jenner's fiancee, the aforementioned Timothée Chalamet. It also hits on the whole virality of internet culture, with Kylie Jenner's wikipedia page ending with a link to the page for 'Famous for being famous'. If that does not encapsulate everything about what Zamiri is commenting on in his music video and feature film... Zamiri is not necessarily critical of internet culture in the way other directors sometimes are. He understands you are part of it, you can't escape it. He is the moment. You are the moment. The moment will pass into another moment.... And another.... And another.... And a....
