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CLIPPING
Visions of Bodies Being Burned is less a sequel than it is the second half of a planned diptych. It turns out, Clipping took to the thematic material of horrorcore like vampires to grave soil. Before the release of There Existed an Addiction to Blood, Clipping and Sub Pop Records divided the material up into two albums, designed to be released only months apart. However, a global pandemic and multiple canceled tours pushed the release of the project’s “part two” until the following Halloween season.
Visions of Bodies Being Burned contains sixteen more scary stories disguised as rap songs, incorporating as much influence from Ernest Dickerson, Clive Barker, and Shirley Jackson as it does from Three 6 Mafia, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Brotha Lynch Hung. Clipping’s angular, shattered interpretations of existing musical styles are always deferential, driven by fandom for the object of study rather than disdain for it. Clipping reimagine horrorcore—the purposely absurdist hip-hop subgenre that flourished in the 1990s—the way Jordan Peele does horror cinema: by twisting beloved tropes to make explicit their own radical politics of monstrosity, fear, and the uncanny.
The album features a host of collaborators: Inglewood’s Cam & China, fellow noise-rap pioneers Ho99o9, Tortoise guitar genius Jeff Parker, and experimental LA drummer Ted Byrnes. The final track, “Secret Piece,” is a performance of a Yoko Ono text score from 1953 that instructs the players to “Decide on one note that you want to play/Play it with the following accompaniment: the woods from 5am to 8am in summer,” and features nearly all of the musicians who appeared on both albums.
Since their last album, Daveed Diggs—the group’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning rapper—has starred in the TNT science fiction series, Snowpiercer, voiced a character in Pixar’s Soul, and portrayed Frederick Douglass in Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird. Writer Rivers Solomon’s novella based on Clipping’s Hugo-nominated song “The Deep” has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, and won the Lambda Literary Award for best LGBTQ SF/Fantasy/Horror novel. Clipping’s song “Chapter 319”—a tribute to George Floyd (AKA Big Floyd) the former DJ-Screw affiliated rapper who was murdered by police officers in May of 2020—was released on Bandcamp on June 19th and raised over $20,000 for racial justice charities. A clip of the song also became a popular meme on TikTok, generating over 50,000 videos in which teenagers rapped the song’s lyrics (“Donald Trump is a white supremacist, full stop…”) directly into the frowning faces of their conservative parents. The band also contributed a Skinny Puppy-esque rework of J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” to Save Stereogum: An ‘00s Covers Comp.
TRACK LISTING
Intro
Say The Name
Wytchboard (Interlude)*
'96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)
Something Underneath
Make Them Dead
She Bad
Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)*
Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)
Check The Lock
Looking Like Meat (feat. Ho99o9)
Drove (Interlude)*
Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)
Body For The Pile (with Sickness)
Enlacing
Secret Piece
*CD/digital/cassette-only Tracks
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- Ltd 12"
- £13.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- SP1226
- Release date
- 29 Nov '19
TRACK LISTING
The Deep
Aquacode Databreaks (ft Shabazz Palaces)
Drownt
The Deep (Instrumental)
Aquacode Databreaks (Instrumental)
Drownt (Instrumental)
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- SPCD1330
- Release date
- 18 Oct '19
"There Existed an Addiction to Blood" finds Clipping interpreting another rap splinter sect through their singular lens. This is Clipping’s transmutation of horrorcore, a purposefully absurdist and creatively significant sub-genre that flourished in the mid-90s. If some of its most notable pioneers included Brotha Lynch Hung and Gravediggaz, it also encompasses seminal works from the Geto Boys, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the near-entirety of classic Memphis cassette tape rap.
The most subversive and experimental rap has often presented itself as an alternative to conventional sounds, but Clipping respectfully warp them into new constellations. "There Existed an Addiction to Blood" absorbs the hyper-violent horror tropes of the Murder Dog era, but re-imagines them in a new light: still darkly-tinted and somber, but in a weirder and more vivid hue. If traditional horrorcore was akin to Blacula, the hugely popular blaxploitation flick from the early 70s, Clipping’s latest is analogous to Ganja & Hess, the blood-sipping 1973 cult classic regarded as an unsung landmark of black independent cinema, whose score by Sam Waymon, the band samples on "Blood of the Fang" and inspired the album’s title.
TRACK LISTING
1. Intro
2. Nothing Is Safe
3. He Dead (feat. Ed Balloon)
4. Haunting (Interlude)
5. La Mala Ordina (feat. The Rita, Benny The Butcher & El Camino)
6. Club Down (feat. Sarah Bernat)
7. Prophecy (Interlude)
8. Run For Your Life (feat. La Chat)
9. The Show
10. Possession (Interlude)
11. All In Your Head (feat.Counterfeit Madison & Robyn Hood)
12. Blood Of The Fang
13. Story 7
14. Attunement (feat. Pedestrian Deposit)
15. Piano Burning (composed By Annea Lockwood)
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- SPCD1173
- Release date
- 9 Sep '16
Clipping released ‘Midcity’ on their website in 2013 and signed with Sub Pop three months later. The band described their debut as “party music for the club you wish you hadn’t gone to, the car you don’t remember getting in, and the streets you don’t feel safe on.” In 2014, they released their Sub Pop debut, ‘CLPPNG’, omitting the ‘I’ in the title and lyrics to vacate rap of its traditional centre, revealing instead a collage of recurrent rap themes. 2016’s ‘Wriggle’ EP, released after Daveed’s Tony award for his role as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the acclaimed Broadway musical ‘Hamilton’, included ‘Shooter’, which used gunshot sounds as the beat for an imagistic narrative of three different violent encounters.
Since the release of ‘CLPPNG’ things have changed for the band - William finished his Ph.D. in Theater & Performance Studies with a dissertation on experimental music, Jonathan composed scores for the films ‘Starry Eyes’, ‘The Nightmare’, ‘Excess Flesh’ and ‘Contracted: Phase II’ and Daveed hit Broadway. Their activities outside Clipping have always influenced their work in the band but never as much as in the creation of ‘Splendor & Misery’.
‘Splendor & Misery’ is an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship and the onboard computer that falls in love with him. Thinking he is alone and lost in space, the character discovers music in the ship’s shuddering hull and chirping instrument panels. William and Jonathan’s tracks draw an imaginary sonic map of the ship’s decks, hallways and quarters, while Daveed’s lyrics ride the rhythms produced by its engines and machinery. In a reversal of HP Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic insignificance, the character finds relief in learning that humanity is of no consequence to the vast, uncaring universe. Ultimately, the character decides to pilot his ship into the unknown - and possibly into oblivion - instead of continuing on to worlds whose systems of governance and economy have violently oppressed him.
TRACK LISTING
Long Way Away (Intro)
The Breach
All Black
Interlude 01 (Freestyle)
Wake Up
Long Way Away
Interlude 02 (Numbers)
True Believer
Long Way Away
(Instrumental)
Air ‘Em Out
Interlude 03 (Freestyle)
Break The Glass
Story 5
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- 2xLP
- £15.49
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- SP1071
- Release date
- 16 Jun '14
-
- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- SPCD1071
- Release date
- 9 Jun '14
Since the above was written, things have changed for clipping. The band found that listeners were more ready for them than they’d first imagined. Before 2013’s ‘Midcity’, the trio of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson did not expect to find an audience for their abrasive brand of rap music. The project was initially a remix project, an aside to the members’ main occupations - Diggs is a stage actor, while Snipes composes music for film and Hutson is an established noise music artist (Snipes and Hutson collaborated on the score to 2013’s IFC documentary ‘Room 237’). However, since the formation of clipping., the field of commercial music enlarged ever so slightly, making room again for noisier, more adventurous elements in electronic production (though clipping. insist they simply make rap music).
‘CLPPNG’ is a much more ambitious project than ‘Midcity’. The album features guest verses from some of the band’s strongest influences, including Gangsta Boo (formerly of Three 6 Mafia and currently of Da Mafia 6ix), Guce (longtime Bay Area mainstay, member of Bullys Wit Fullys), King T (all-around West Coast gangster rap legend, founder of the Likwit Crew and mentor to Xzibit and Tha Alkaholiks). For the track Work Work’ clipping. joined up with Cocc Pistol Cree, a newcomer from Compton best known for her appearance on DJ Mustard’s mixtape ‘Ketchup’ and her song ‘Lady Killa.’
‘CLPPNG’ stretches the band’s experimental sounds to fit a wider emotional range. ‘Midcity’ had anger and aggression figured out, but ‘CLPPNG’ fits the group’s harsh electronics to club tracks, slow jams, songs to strip to and more. Relying heavily on musique-concrète techniques, the trio built many of the tracks out of field recordings and acoustic sounds. The beat for ‘Tonight’ (featuring Gangsta Boo) evokes a nasty, late night encounter with its fleshy slaps and squishy, biological noises, while ‘Dream’ utilizes natural ambiences to create a bleary, hypnagogic mis-en-scène. The band hasn’t gone soft, however; the album’s intro is likely the most uncompromisingly brutal piece of music they’ve yet recorded and ‘Or Die’ (featuring Guce) is as mean as anything on ‘Midcity’. ‘CLPPNG’ is an album that demonstrates the variety of sounds available when the ‘rules’ of a genre are wilfully questioned.