On Being

Imagine staring at a lava lamp while really good electronic music plays, except the visuals are way more complex and someone clearly spent a long time making them feel like they're alive. That's roughly the vibe of On Being, a one-off avant-garde music video collaboration between electronic artist Max Cooper and visual artist Félix Gerbelot. There's no plot here, no characters, no dialogue: just abstract imagery that shifts and breathes alongside the music, pulling you into this meditative headspace where sound and visuals feel like the same thing. It's short, it's weird, and it's the kind of thing you throw on when you want something that hits more like an experience than a story. The animation doesn't try to illustrate the music so much as exist alongside it, letting you draw your own meaning from whatever's unfolding on screen. Some moments feel organic, others feel cosmic, and the whole thing has this quiet emotional weight that sneaks up on you. If you've ever gotten lost in the visual albums of Interstella 5555 or vibed with the more experimental segments of Fantasia, this sits in that same territory: music and art fused together without anyone feeling the need to explain what it means. If you liked the abstract passages in Mind Game or the sensory overload of Belladonna of Sadness, On Being scratches a similar itch in a much more condensed form. Best watched with headphones, lights low, no distractions.