Squid — Building 650

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Squid — Building 650 (2025) Director: Felix Geen Era: Post-Punk Art Rock Revival / Mid-2020s (2025) - Second wave of UK art rock experimentalism on Warp Records, merging post-punk density with cinematic literary influence and transnational production High curatorial value as a formally distinctive artefact at the intersection of UK post-punk revival, Japanese urban visual culture, and hybrid analogue/digital filmmaking. The tri-directorial structure and Tokyo location shoot make this a rare case study in international art rock music video production. Thematic coherence between song, lyrical source material, and visual execution is exceptionally strong, making it an ideal archive candidate for studies of literary adaptation, post-COVID cultural expression, and prestige independent label visual production. Context: Released January 8, 2025 as the second single from Squid's third album 'Cowards' (Warp Records, February 7, 2025), 'Building 650' channels the band's 2022 experience of arriving in Tokyo just two days after Japan's COVID-era travel ban was lifted — rendering them among the only Western tourists in the city. The lyrical and visual concept draws on Ryu Murakami's novel 'In The Miso Soup' and Sophia Coppola's 'Lost in Translation,' interrogating the specific existential loneliness of navigating a hyper-populated yet acoustically silent megalopolis as an outsider. The tri-directorial collaboration between a UK-based CGI auteur and two Tokyo-based local filmmakers formally enacts the cross-cultural dissonance at the song's core, producing a visual language that is neither documentary ethnography nor pure abstraction but a hybrid of both. Director notes: Geen co-directed 'Building 650' with Japanese local directors Daisuke Hasegawa and Kuya Tatsujo, shooting the video entirely in Tokyo. The production incorporated 8mm film footage shot by Hasegawa and Tatsujo alongside Geen's wider cityscape and architectural work. Geen described the collaboration as bringing a grounding 'human touch' to balance his more expansive deconstructed city shots. The video was inspired thematically by the novel 'In The Miso Soup' by Ryu Murakami and the experience of post-COVID isolation as a foreign visitor in Tokyo. Geen had previously directed Squid's 'Narrator' video, establishing him as a longtime visual collaborator with the band.