clipping. - Horror and Noise

Rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes have known each other since they were young: the first two from school, the third joining in their college years. In 2010 the trio, hailing from Los Angeles, start getting serious, but their first mixtape won't arrive until 2013.
As a name they choose Clipping, but decide to write it clipping., in lowercase and with a period: it's a way of setting themselves apart even before you've heard a single note. In this piece we'll depart from that stylization purely for readability's sake, so we'll use Clipping throughout. The term isn't random: clipping is a distortion that occurs when an audio output signal is too high, cutting off the peaks of the sound waves, flattening them out and warping the sound.
In short, right from their name they present themselves as something different and aggressive, decidedly noisy. They would live up to - and surpass - that intent: within just a few years they'd become one of the most original acts in the entire US hip-hop scene, a reference point for anyone seeking power and intensity in the genre, pushed all the way to the deafening, to the overwhelming. In dialogue with the avant-garde, from John Cage to Annea Lockwood, but also with gangsta rap, industrial hip-hop, glitch music and horror/slasher film soundtracks, with a pinch of science fiction thrown in (much like Cannibal Ox).
Heirs to Dalek, with whom they share a love of cacophony and a rejection of hip-hop clichés, Clipping set themselves apart through a less politicized approach and a looser relationship with the traditional song model. In some ways, they can also be compared to Death Grips, though with substantial differences: while the latter have a more punk, visceral, nihilistic attitude, Clipping favor a sound that's menacing rather than angry, dark rather than screamed, cold rather than impulsive; if Death Grips are a punch in the face, Clipping's violence is more psychological. But ultimately, no group can really be said to resemble Clipping, given their peculiar blend of fully hip-hop elements with a universe of other influences, as well as a series of curious aesthetic choices - including the fact that Diggs's lyrics avoid first-person narration, or that many of the sounds used were field-recorded rather than drawn from typical producer sample libraries. Disorienting and experimental, Clipping also boast a sense of ambition that's rare, if not unique, in hip-hop, one that has turned some of their albums into cohesive, coherent concept records, despite their eccentric premises and idiosyncratic execution.

The noise years: midcity, CLPPNG, Splendor & Misery

The mixtape with which they debut, midcity (2013), greets the unsuspecting listener with a torrential, noisy assault right from the intro, with no beat recognizable as traditional hip-hop in sight: it's all announced by the line "It's Clipping, bitch".
The thuds and clangs arrive only on the second "loud", opened by a wall of noise worthy of Merzbow. Throughout, Diggs raps frantically, doubled by voices monstrously warped or multiplied by echo.
The rest of the tracklist keeps pairing traditionally hip-hop elements, scratching included, with ferocious noise, grafted onto industrial or glacial electronic backdrops. The work on individual sounds is already obsessive, shunning any hint of banality. At times, the impression is that industrial-noise-hip-hop tracks have been taken apart and reassembled until they sound unrecognizable, as on "bullshit".
The final, scant eleven minutes obsessively repeat "get money" over a soundscape of suffocating, deafening tension.
This incarnation of Clipping is to hip-hop what Royal Trux's "Twin Infinitives" is to rock.

Signed by the legendary label Sub Pop, they release their official debut CLPPNG in 2014, an album that's more complex and varied, partly stepping back from the sonic assault of their debut mixtape. Numerous guests show up too. Industrial-noise doses have been added ("Body & Blood"; "Or Die"), tied to a more apocalyptic aesthetic, alongside hallucinated explorations ("Work Work", with a sort of southern-style hook; "Tonight", a mix of Kanye West and musique concrète) or abstract, deconstructed rap cuts ("Summertime"; "Get Up" with its alarm clock; the shapeshifting "Story 2"; the dark synthwave of "Ends"). They also venture down the path of cyborg hip-hop on "Taking Off", the whispered "Dream", and even find room for a closing homage to John Cage.

Although CLPPNG is a creative, varied album, there's a lingering fear that they may have already lost that fierce will to stun the listener. The EP Wriggle doesn't dispel those doubts, even though the title track and its frantic beat rank among the most entertaining creations of their entire career, a wildly danceable track. Still, for anyone used to the banalities of mainstream US hip-hop, "Hot Fuck No Love" is pure gold. An extended edition would follow in 2021, with five remixes, mostly worthwhile for completists.

Their second studio album, fortunately, shows an entirely different level of ambition. It's a science-fiction concept record, steeped in Afrofuturism and space travel. Splendor & Misery (2016) tells the story of Cargo #2331, a slave who survives aboard a spaceship in the company of an intelligent onboard computer. A bizarre love story unfolds, laced with thriller elements. The sonic flow is unique, fragmented, unreal. The centerpiece is probably "All Black", an Aesop Rock aboard the spaceship from "Alien", but there are another 14 varied and creative tracks alongside it, pieces of a puzzle that demolishes and rebuilds experimental hip-hop, allowing room for spiritual echoes ("Long Way Away"; "True Believer") as well as fresh noise assaults ("Baby Don't Sleep").
The songs, insofar as you can even speak of songs on this album, matter less than the whole: "Air 'Em Out" launches OutKast into orbit; "A Better Place" is a comic robotic dance number with '70s-style sounds, closed out by a deafening wall of noise.
The assault, more psychological now than physical, increasingly draws the listener into a disorienting narrative, with sounds that lull and stun in equal measure.

The name Clipping begins to circulate among a wider audience, both thanks to some more highbrow recognition - like two nominations for the famous Hugo Awards, given to the best works of science fiction and fantasy - and through contact with more pop-leaning culture, such as one of their tracks being featured on the Adult Swim animated series "Rick And Morty". One of their 2017 tracks, "The Deep", grows into a visionary, self-titled EP in 2019 and even a novel by Rivers Solomon that wins the Lambda Award, given to works dealing with LGBT themes, and goes on to earn other major nominations.
Musically, The Deep consists of three tracks that blend nods to '70s science fiction with the cinematic sound design of blockbuster movies.

The Face (2018) is another trio of short compositions, this time even less tied to a traditional idea of song, spread across numerous remixes. The scant two minutes of "Face" are perhaps the moment they most resemble Death Grips and their obsessive style, while the hallucinated tension of "Block" anticipates the horror masterpieces to come: a synth tolls, noise creeps through the arrangement like poison, exploding into alien sounds of pure terror, worthy of the harrowing visions of David Lynch's "Eraserhead".

The horror years: "There Existed An Addiction To Blood" and "Visions Of Bodies Being Burned"

They describe it as a transmutation of horrorcore, the hip-hop subgenre dealing in horror, the occult and the supernatural - the one carried out on There Existed An Addiction To Blood (2019). If their previous work had already been decidedly ambitious, this time the trio go as far as including a reinterpretation of Annea Lockwood's "Piano Burning": 18 minutes that seem intent on sealing a departure from the rest of hip-hop in favor of intellectual exploration, without ever becoming heady, sterile or cold in the process.
The long, incendiary finale, then, plays like a definitive consecration of the group's aesthetic quest, one that over the preceding 50 minutes delivers everything you could ask for in terms of creativity, blending industrial and hip-hop with deafening floods of noise, bending established models until they're unrecognizable while simultaneously sketching out a precise, deliberate imaginative dimension somewhere between horror film, thriller and spoken-word performance.
So allow me, having started from the album's pyromaniac conclusion, to retrace the journey from the beginning.
The obsessive piano pulse of "Nothing Is Safe" introduces the record's rhythmic approach, which exploits every possible trick to avoid worn-out beats, favoring far more original solutions, often to the point of erasing any cyclical structure or recognizable groove. For the first proper track, though, they rely on an interplay of retro synth and piano, over which rapper Daveed Diggs faces the tough job of moving with agility, making sure the minimalism doesn't anesthetize the emotional tension into a vintage, gothic meditation. When a trap beat finally takes over, after 150 seconds, the trio has already made it abundantly clear that we're not listening to just another record riding the dominant trend of this closing decade.

Somethin’ ‘bout how he walks remind you of someone
You look and see a gun, a man with no face
A golden halo that could be the sun

That's confirmed by the crossing of Tibetan drones and supersonic rhymes on "He Dead", though the dismantling of the typical hip-hop model takes shape above all on "La Mala Ordina", a collaborative track on which Elcamino, Benny The Butcher and The Rita let a hardcore rap cut drown in synth distortion, until the decibels explode into an increasingly monstrous, deafening, mechanical voice, and then into a long final stretch of pure harsh noise, Merzbow-level stuff.
After such an assault on the eardrums, there's a void that "Club Down" (with Sarah Bennat) fills with thriller-style blasts, doing away with the beat altogether, in an anxiety-inducing climax made claustrophobic by lacerating screams in the background; a gangsta-rap refrain does nothing to help, a grotesque bit of comic relief in a landscape of desolation and violence.
In the mechanical clangor of "Run For Your Life", featuring La Chat, the arrangement is urban musique concrète that only slowly channels itself into industrial-hip-hop rhythms, with "The Show" picking up conceptually from there, building a danceable track out of mechanical puffs and thuds, complete with handclaps and a cacophonous Nine Inch Nails-style surge at the end. Another minimal arrangement, with an atypical beat, on "All In Your Head", featuring Counterfeit Madison and Robyn Hood, surprises by revealing a soul heart, inevitably smothered beneath the most deafening chaos.
The rollercoaster ride takes a Death Grips- and Run The Jewels-like turn with "Blood Of The Fang", a frantic, skipping, danceable cut with tight-knit rhymes and some dizzying extra beats, later echoed in the incredible verbal assault of "Attunement" featuring Pedestrian Deposit, while "Story 7" fragments the rhythm, slowing it down and interrupting it, leaving Diggs to navigate a disorienting pseudo-groove like an Aesop Rock in top form. Then comes that burning piano, a symbol of music in flames that finds in death its final possible gesture, and so, silence. Having listened to this monster, you're left with the impression that the album is gradually swallowed by darkness, shedding beats and points of reference until it reaches its abstract, instrumental conclusion, one that's perhaps best taken as an alternative to the sheer emptiness that typically follows a listen like this.

Made only slightly less fluid by an excess of interludes, so ambitious it can come across as cocky, There Existed An Addiction To Blood minimizes its own flaws through a clear creative vision, one that systematizes hip-hop's industrial, cacophonous vocabulary with horror of Carpenter-esque memory, acting as a bridge toward an avant-garde that sounds postmodern, intellectual, but also tremendously visceral, concrete, urban.
On its own, this album reinvents the horrorcore of Gravediggaz, Three-6 Mafia and The Geto Boys, breathing new life into a style rightly presumed dead.

They return to the scene of the crime in 2020 with a title that's violent and dark from the very start: Visions Of Bodies Being Burned. For their fourth album — an ideal sequel and completion of the discourse begun a year earlier — they don't abandon their amalgam of deafening cacophonies, electro-industrial clangor, and horrorcore shadows that reinterpret the hip-hop model in an original way. What's new is that, bolstered by experience, they can broaden their compositional solutions, evolving the model already on display.
Needless to say, this isn't material for the faint of heart or the delicate of eardrum, but rather a shattering, annihilating tunnel of horror inhabited by murderers, cannibals, monsters and other paranormal phenomena. Barely two minutes in, a cacophonous assault marks the ideal opening of the dance: welcome back to hell.
As with the 2019 gem, there are surprising balances between the aggressive, the obsessive and the catchy, as in "Say The Name", with a rounded bassline worthy of the most sensual Nine Inch Nails and a creative industrial coda. It's a recipe reinterpreted also in "96' Neve Campbell", a blood-soaked Run The Jewels bullet.
The creeping, barely concealed tension explodes in the extra beat of "Something Underneath", a frantic and chaotic deconstruction of the most deafening, terrifying hip-hop: heart-attack material! "Make Them Dead", more a radioactive apocalypse than a nuclear blast, brings out a venomous hip-hop over suffocating distortion, exploiting the unexpected counterpoint of a post-apocalyptic gospel. The screeching scratches that inhabit the darkness of "She Bad" are just another small stroke of genius, while the arrangement moves along cinematic trajectories and the vocals, engaged in a restless rap, break apart and distort at moments of peak tension.
Gripped by an impenetrable night, in the middle of a mental nightmare, we can only let ourselves be slapped around by "Pain Everyday" and its eardrum-shattering breaks, immerse ourselves in the violent noir that "Check The Lock" sketches in the mind, and dance to the cursed music box of "Looking Luke Meat", a dense and devastating horror assault. The ability to organize sounds in space, suggesting unspeakable cavities and terrible presences, disorienting the listener and forcing them into a continuous state of tension, is the album's true engine, and it's only natural that this sonic abomination of beats, reverbs and noise should explode before the end, as happens in the epileptic free-jazz coda of "Eaten Alice".
The fact that it's followed by the homicidal fantasy of "Body For The Pile", which targets police officers, is enough to reignite the tension and opens excellently for the visionary "Enlacing", which fuses Lovecraft and the Salem's "King Night" by Salem.

Things you seen since last you saw yourself would turn a man to dust
The things you dreamed in lieu of all the hells were just imagination ‘cause
You couldn’t bear to see the limit of yourself for what it was
The good you wear on sleeves just isn’t much

Behind the mic, alongside lead MC Daveed Diggs, there are also numerous guests, but it's above all the compositions by Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson that dominate, with the psychotic or esoteric lyrics only adding an extra edge.

Next came other, less structured projects and a handful of remixes in the form of four EPs, released in 2022. They hide a transformation in progress, one that would only take full shape with the album marking their true, long-awaited return in 2025.

Damn kids, they’re all alike, okay
Maybe they’re right, okay
But the shit is getting right today
All it costs is your life, okay, just wait
Just wait
Just wait till it’s on

Cyber-hip-hop: Dead Channel Sky.

Inspired by the parallel paths of cyberpunk subculture and hip-hop, Dead Channel Sky (2025) is a markedly different chapter compared to Clipping's previous two albums.
Split into twenty tracks, nine of which clock in under two minutes, it's a cross between the impulsiveness of a mixtape and the ambition of an eccentric, personal tribute to the history of certain strands of popular culture. Five tracks were released to the public ahead of the album: "Keep Pushing", built around a distorted bassline with a chorus that, rather than pushing forward, almost dissolves into a whisper, colored by classical-leaning strings in the finale; the deafening big beat of "Change The Channel", which sounds like it stepped straight out of the first "Matrix" or the video game "WipeOut 2097"; "Run It" channels the tension of their horrorcore period into a muscular, ultra-violent intensity worthy of the film "Drive" or the acid-drenched shooter "Hotline Miami"; "Welcome Home Warrior" finds in Aesop Rock the ideal interpreter of a retro-futuristic hip-hop, all circuits and crackle.
Opened by the sounds of a 56k modem, unforgettable for anyone who was more than a toddler around the turn of the millennium, Dead Channel Sky easily stands as the most fun album of their career, and the most danceable, thanks to the techno-rap of "Dominator", a sweaty, distorted club banger, the electronic, technological hip-hop of "Code", with a vibrant, tragic string arrangement in the background, and the breakneck jazzstep of "Dodger", with that idea of cyber that now belongs to a quarter century ago. The latter is, naturally, an occasion for Daveed Diggs to deliver a dizzying extra beat. The fact that "Dodger" then becomes the backdrop for an improvisation by Nels Cline, a leading figure in jazz improvisation guitar, is just the latest extravagance in a discography that has always engaged in dialogue with music's most avant territories. They even turn sensual on "Mirrorshades pt. 2" (featuring Cartel Madras), with its square, danceable beat and a whole arsenal of ambient sounds typical of the futuristic aesthetic of thirty years ago.
The noise-driven impulses also return in the form of short tracks, some abstract and rap-free like the two "Simple Degradation" pieces (with the computer music collective Bitpanic), or woven into relatively more traditional songs, like "Polaroids", built on extremely high-pitched digital sounds, at the edge of audibility, which form one of their trademark atypical beats.
There's room for a finale of great suspense in "Ask What Happened", which even recalls Splendor & Misery, the trio's space-themed concept album: it opens amid glacial synths and then stirs into a supersonic amen break, before being sucked into a digital nightmare, a lethal glitch. But "Ask What Happened" is also an indictment of the system and its injustices, a political track whose lengthy lyrics cite environmental and economic disasters, finding in music outside the mainstream, and in the fight against power waged partly through technology, a way out.
Clipping thus close out their most immediate album on a very bitter note, consistent with their position as outsiders within a hip-hop landscape that, in recent years, has often been dominated by celebrations of the very power and wealth of billionaires:

History and future belong to the one percent, though
Records in the present got bass to rattle they fence, okay
Trickle-down Monopoly money is just a game, no
Made a revolution by playin’ with model trains, so
Phreak a telephone and live free up inside they brains, though
They sayin’, ‘Damn kid, all he doin’ is playin’ games’

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