We live in an age where most information creeps along silently from cellphone to social media platform to laptop, invisibly ricocheting from ground to satellite and back again. Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes of the Los Angeles hip-hop trio clipping. want to bring back the noise, with the screech of dial-up modems heralding their pre-millennial tension.
In his essay for the press release that accompanies the band’s latest, Dead Channel Sky, Roy Christoper — author of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future — highlights a kind of cultural apocalypse that runs parallel between hip-hop and cyberpunk at the end of the 20th century, mentioning films like Blade Runner and The Matrix.
This music here is less the atmospheric synthesizers of a Vangelis score and more the kind of neural buzz and ecstasy rush of the Crystal Method, the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy soundtracking films like the mid-’90s inside-the-computer action of Hackers. However block-rockin’ their beats might be, clipping. aren’t excavating the past just for the sake of nostalgia.
Where their last couple of albums used Diggs’s blowtorch flow to fuse creeping industrial noise, harsh beats and horror movie samples, the vibe goes from fiery orange (2020’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned) and blood red (2019’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood) to neon-blue blankness and the green-text-on-black-screen scroll seared into the retinas of innumerable basement dwellers.
It’s in this virtual space that Diggs finds all of the quicksilver tales of sex, drugs and violence that ’90s gangsta rap used to trade in — except here, they’re wired together yet dislocated, provocative yet impersonal. Hutson and Snipes gleefully resurrect the adrenalized club beats of that same era, with occasional breathers that flirt with the ambience of Massive Attack or Tricky when darkness starts to suffer the threat of dawn, all tied together with the static pulse of electricity and the flow of information.
The package in total is a dense, novella-length tapestry where sex is digitized, the sky is full of ads, the past is a Polaroid that no one wants to hold onto, and a constant intake of substances is the only way to engage, detach, engage, detach.
Guest spots by electronic improvisers Bitpanic, plus vocal turns from Cartel Madras (“Mirrorshades, pt. 2”) and Aesop Rock (“Welcome Home Warrior”), further expand the parameters of clipping’s take on cyberpunk. Dead Channel Sky is a masterful example of how the textural map of the digital past can easily be overlaid onto the present — and how that age’s promise is being paid in full, or rather in empty, right now.
