FEATURE
Nadia Lee Cohen Brings Aphex Twin’s Korg Funk 5 to Life RETRO REVERIE
by THE FASHIONOGRAPHY
N
adia Lee Cohen has never shied away from bending reality into something both alluring and unsettling. The
photographer and filmmaker—celebrated for her surreal collaborations with Saint Laurent and Tyler, the Creator—has unveiled a new vision: a video for Aphex Twin’s 2017 track Korg Funk 5. Co-directed with Charlie Denis, the film surfaced unannounced on Instagram, where it immediately rippled through feeds, merging the cult world of Richard D. James (the man behind Aphex Twin) with Cohen’s uncanny lens. The track itself is already a family affair, featuring vocals from James’s son and composed entirely on Korg synthesizers. Cohen leans into this intimacy, weaving a home-movie sensibility with her signature retro flair. Saturated tones, satire-laced styling, and a fashion editorial’s sense of narrative give the song an unexpected visual wardrobe. It’s a meeting of avant-garde minds: James, with his appetite for sonic extremes—what he once called “fucked-muffled/lo-bit/’70s sound”— and Cohen, with her cinematic nods to bygone decades. Where Aphex Twin’s visuals have long flirted with the uncanny—from distorted faces in Come to Daddy to warped live projections—this clip trades menace for nostalgia. The result feels both familiar and estranged, a surreal reflection of electronic music’s underground pulse refracted through fashion’s dreamscape. For Cohen, the project underscores her knack for building worlds that straddle the line between glossy artifice and disquieting truth. By applying her fashion-forward sensibilities to one of electronic music’s most enigmatic figures, she has created a piece that doesn’t just illustrate a track but expands it, suggesting that sound and image, in their most daring forms, can share the same surreal frequency.
8 EC Talk | September 2025
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