REAS

VIDEOS FOR MUSIC

In 2017, Casey Reas directed six music videos for The National’s album Sleep Well Beast, collaborating with the band and their long-time creative partners. The videos extend the album’s design language into motion, using generative systems to create evolving abstract imagery that complement the record’s atmosphere and themes. Released on the band’s official channels, they reached tens of millions internationally, and introduced computational approaches to video to a broad public.

Reas’ collaboration with The National built on a creative relationship that began years earlier when he played in the band Nancy with Matt Berninger and Scott Devendorf. For Sleep Well Beast, the band invited him to shape a unified visual language across multiple singles. Working in dialogue with the album identity, Reas developed custom software in Processing to transform video through generative systems. While each video carries its own rhythm and character, together they form a coherent visual world, and expand the album’s presence beyond sound into moving images.

The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness

The video for The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness, the album’s first single, establishes the visual language that carries through the Sleep Well Beast cycle. The work combines landscape and performance footage of the band with generative overlays and distortions. Layers of color fields, flickering grids, and shifting textures intervene on the filmed material to produce a dialogue between figuration and geometric abstraction.

STills from the system only dreams in total darkness, 2017.
The generative elements were designed to move with the dynamics of the song, at times dissolving the image into near-total abstraction, and at others revealing the performers in fleeting clarity. This tension between legibility and distortion mirrors the record’s sound, where raw instrumentation is combined with electronic layers and dense production. The result is a video that functions as both documentation of performance and as a generative moving image, introducing the broader cycle as a unified extension of the album’s design in dialogue with Reas’ Signal to Noise aesthetics.

Director: Casey Reas
DP/Drone Operator: Dan Huiting
Drone Operator: Joah Milbrath

Guilty Party

Guilty Party unfolds through a set of four figures whose identities remain unresolved: a girl and a young woman, and a boy and a young man. They may be the same characters at different stages of life, or a family. This doubling invokes the image of Janus, the mythological figure that looks both forward and backward, thus embodying past and future in a single moment.

In the video, the heads of the characters are always turning, and their eyes are always closed. This motion creates a sense of inwardness and detachment, as if they are suspended in a state of perpetual reflection or dream. Their presence is gradually dissolved through generative overlays that invert, blur, and transform the filmed image into drifting fields of color and light. The instability of the imagery mirrors the uncertainty of the characters themselves, as they are caught between clarity and dissolution, memory and projection.

Stills from Guilty Party, 2017.
Rather than telling a linear story, the video operates as a meditation on time and identity. Its doubled figures and layered abstractions echo the song’s atmosphere of melancholy and reflection, reinforcing the album’s themes of fragmentation and instability.

Director: Casey Reas
DP: Matthew Miller
DP for Long Pond Studio & Drone Footage: Dan Huiting
Drone Operator: Joah Milbrath

Carin at the Liquor Store

The video for Carin at the Liquor Store was filmed as a straightforward concert performance. The footage was then processed by inverting the frames and introducing a blur that softened detail and slowed the perception of motion. These interventions transform the familiar form of a concert video into something dreamlike: the performance remains recognizable, yet the band dissolves into shifting gradients of light and shadow. In this way, the work emphasizes atmosphere over documentation, aligning with the song’s introspective tone and extending the album’s visual language through minimal but decisive means.

Stills from Carin at the Liquor Store, 2017.
Director: Casey Reas
Editor: Matthew Miller
Filmed by: La Blogothèque

Day I Die

The video for Day I Die captures a jetlagged rehearsal in Paris and compresses it into a rapid sequence of still images. More than 5,000 photographs were taken in succession and assembled as a time-lapse, turning an ordinary session into a flickering stream of frozen instants. The camera alternates between wide shots from the balcony and close portraits of each band member, showing them rehearsing, pausing to chat, and pushing through exhaustion. What might have been a straightforward record of practice becomes something restless and charged, shaped as much by repetition as by performance.

Stills from DAY i Die, 2017.
Rather than continuous motion, the video builds rhythm from the accumulation of fragments. Stutters and repetitions drive the images forward, amplifying the pace of the track while also echoing its themes of distance and disconnection. The musicians appear together yet apart—sometimes engaged, sometimes withdrawn—embodying the uncertainty of presence that runs through the lyrics. Both documentary and abstract, the video extends Reas’ ongoing interest in systems that reorganize perception, here refracted through the strain and atmosphere of rehearsal.

Director: Casey Reas
DP: Graham MacIndoe

Sleep Well Beast

The video for Sleep Well Beast, the album’s title track, was conceived as both portrait and document. It begins outside the former Brooklyn homes of the band members, with the camera always positioned on the exterior and looking inward through windows and thresholds. This perspective establishes a sense of distance and suspension, echoing the song’s atmosphere of waiting and dislocation, where past places linger but no longer hold.

The focus then shifts north to the band’s new studio in Hudson, where the album was recorded. Here, the imagery broadens to include not only the band but also their extended circle—additional musicians, road crew, and management. By bringing this larger community into view, the video situates the song within the lived reality of touring and collaboration, framing the band as part of the network that carried the album forward.

StillS from sleep well beast, 2017.
As the tour drew to a close, Sleep Well Beast became a record of transition. It moves between past and present, private and collective, carrying the undertone of something fraying and about to change. Always returning to the motif of looking in from outside, the video balances intimacy with distance as a way to ground the record’s abstract design language in concrete places, people, and the passage of time.

Co-Directors: Casey Reas and Graham MacIndoe
DP: Graham MacIndoe
Editor: Matthew Miller

Walk It Back

The video for Walk It Back is built from close-up recordings of a cathode ray tube display. Each image is filtered through the RGB phosphor grid, at times resolving into discrete red, green, and blue elements, and at others dissolving into blur and grain. This extreme proximity turns the raster itself into subject, reducing political imagery to the material texture of broadcast technology.

Stills from Walk It Back, 2018.
All of the raw footage for Walk It Back originated from C-SPAN: politicians at podiums, chambers called to order, and standing ovations. These procedural images of government are destabilized as they pass through the CRT’s surface, and their authority is fractured by the screen’s microscopic structure. The speech attributed to Karl Rove about the “reality-based community” is woven into the soundtrack, and the imagery echoes its theme—power experienced not as clarity but as mediation, distortion, and projection.

The result is a video where recognition is fleeting. Faces and gestures surface only to fragment into fields of color and flickering grids. By collapsing political theater into the granular fabric of the screen, Walk It Back locates the fragility of truth within the very material of broadcast media.

Director: Casey Reas
DP: Matthew Miller
Editor: Matthew Miller

Guilty Party @ Basilica Hudson

In July 2017, Guilty Party expanded beyond video form into a one-night event at Basilica Hudson, a converted factory on the Hudson River. The National performed alongside their collaborators Sō Percussion, Mouse on Mars, and Buke & Gase, with the concert staged as an immersive environment that blurred distinctions between performance, installation, and social gathering.

Buke & gase performing at basilica hudson in 2017.

Mouse on Mars performing at basilica hudson in 2017.

Visuals for the evening were created by processing live videos feeds, extending the systems behind the videos into a performance setting. Instead of fixed works, software generated shifting layers of abstraction in real time, responding to the music and filling the industrial space with unstable, process-driven imagery.

Taking place midway through the production of the Sleep Well Beast videos, the Hudson event tested the cycle’s language outside of the studio. It showed how the same generative approach could function both as a visual identity for the band, and as an adaptable system for live performance.

Connections

The Sleep Well Beast videos, along with the Basilica Hudson event, form a coherent body of work that extends Reas’ interest in systems and generative processes into the sphere of popular music. Each video engaged the band’s sound and identity while filtering performance, portraiture, and political imagery through custom software. Some works relied heavily on algorithmic overlays, while others applied subtle transformations—but all were inflected by procedures that shifted images away from straightforward documentation toward instability and abstraction.

This cycle also connects directly to the ULTRACONCENTRATED works, where media images are reorganized through processes of fragmentation, layering, and generative collage. Both bodies of work interrogate how images carry meaning, and how software can be used to disrupt their legibility. In Sleep Well Beast, these methods reached a wider audience, circulating within the channels of contemporary music while continuing the trajectory of Reas’ exploration of image, media, and code.

Related Artworks

Browse the Videos for Music category on the REAS INDEX.