With Dead Channel Sky, clipping. continue to break musical boundaries. Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes take Kit Richardson through a deep dive of the songs that inspire their collective mindset.
When it comes to album concepts, clipping. really commit.
For their 2020 record Visions of Bodies Being Burned - released, appropriately, mid-pandemic - the trio zero’d in on the horror genre. In William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’ production, crunchy beats and breaks were peppered with samples from paranormal investigators and of empty forests; synths stolen from Video Nasty soundtracks.
Alongside them, frontman Daveed Diggs told stories that melded real-life and fictional horror; that placed Clive Barker next to George Floyd. Even the vinyl artwork featured a press shot of the trio fractured by shattered glass.
Now, five years later, the band have taken on another beloved genre - cyberpunk - and have gone similarly to town. Boasting features from Aesop Rock and Cartel Madras, Dead Channel Sky takes slang from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and musical notes from rave, acid techno and Big Beat (a favourite of Snipes’). Diggs even interrogated his computer-scientist brother for material for the album’s closer, “Ask What Happened”.
“I called him, and I was like, ‘Is there some piece of literature that actual hackers would recognise?’ and he said, ‘Well, when we were kids, you know, Loyd Blankenship wrote the hacker's manifesto in 1986 and that became a thing’. And so the line - ‘Damn kids. They're all alike’ - is taken from that. Rallying the hackers of the world.’”
As we talk, I find a copy of the manifesto, originally called The Conscious of the Hacker, in an old, pre-mobile internet archive, and am filled with nostalgia. William laughs. “We joked that we were going to make our band website for this album look like one of those sites - just a tiled background with a block of green Times New Roman text that you can’t read.”
Jonathan sighs. “Websites like that are super alive in my life, because of all the old dudes who can still repair all this stuff” - he gestures around him at an ample collection of modular synths, “Every weird electronic music repair guy I know in LA has a website like that.”
As the album attests, the world of cyberpunk is both bleak and beautiful. The Nine Songs clipping. have chosen fall at ends of this spectrum - from the eerie, static-soaked broadcasts of Derek Bailey, to the euphoric house of Lil Louis.
William explains that each song had a marked impact on the record. Taken together, they’re a curious mixtape - invoking both societal collapse and the hope that a new, unsullied existence might emerge on the other side.
“Normal (Helston Flora Mix by AFX)” by Baby Ford
JONATHAN: I have no relationship with the original song by Baby Ford. Teenage me was downloading on dial-up internet in the ‘90s, because stuff just wasn't available to me in record stores in Riverside where I grew up. And I didn't have any friends who were into that kind of music. Then, for a while, this track was lost in the sea of Aphex Twin remixes from around the same time.
But it was when I started DJing in the early 2000s that I was able to find a 12 inch of it, and so I played it out a lot. In fact, not that anybody asks me to DJ anymore [smiles] but anytime I play records out, this one comes up.
And I really love the way that the breaks and the 303s are cut and edited. It's so destructive, and yet so funky. Plus, techniques like that aren't really used anymore because it's a really irresponsible way to work. [Laughs]
BILL: I was going to say… I’m just opening the file in Peak [Audio Editor] and just chop-chop-chopping…
JONATHAN: And then there's that weird little bit, where he plays an answering machine message in the middle of it. It’s interesting - I've been listening to a ton of Big Beat records from the ‘90s recently, because we have to come up with some DJ mixes for this album. And those records are sampling everything.
I forgot how many field recordings there are in those; answering machine messages, a tape recorder out in public, with tons of wind and handling noise that just sounds like shit. We’ll talk about the Midfield General record in a second that has…
BILL: A field recording of a preacher.
JONATHAN: Yes! So there’s a lot of wind and handling noise in those recordings that reflects what we do. And I had never really drawn that connection before. Anyway, the way the breaks and the acid stuff is cut on “Run It” was me trying to tip my hat to this Aphex track. This choice could also have easily been that Aphex remix of 808 State too.
BILL: We talk about that one all the time…
“Devil in Sports Casual” by Midfield General
JONATHAN: I loved a lot of that big beat stuff in the ‘90s that made it over here. Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method and all of that.
BILL: Fluke?
BEST FIT: Fluke! I forgot about Fluke.
JONATHAN: But this one I heard more recently, and it’s totally mind blowing. Supposedly, that's just a field recording of a street preacher, right? Cut up to make this track. I like things that wear their conceptualness on their sleeve, the sweet spot for me is a piece of music where you can hear the process and the idea in the execution of it. But that doesn't make it hit any less hard.
Somehow Midfield General’s records are a version of the Big Beat thing that doesn't sound as corny as Fatboy Slim. I actually love those Fatboy Slim records, but there's something pretty cheesy, even a little bit eye-rolly guilty about those. Even in the ‘90s I was kind of embarrassed that I liked them so much. But the Midfield General stuff just hits fucking hard. It feels really tough and sincere, in a way that some of the other stuff maybe didn't.
BILL: To be fair, the Fat Boy Slim remix of “Devil In Sports Casual” is pretty banging. It's got that Billy Squier break in, that the whole genre’s named after.
JONATHAN: I was listening to Better Living Through Chemistry yesterday, which is so so good.”
I’m moving house at the moment, and I’ve been coming across a lot of these Big Beat records. I realised, so many of them were British artists doing a take on Americanism; the samples and vocals are American accents, or clips from American movies. And it occurred to me that we're kind of doing the opposite - Dead Channel Sky is like… Britspolitation, tonnes of references to UK music and beats. I thought it was funny. It never really occurred to me.
“Nothing Fails” by Madonna
JONATHAN: I picked the Madonna song sort of troll these other two guys. [laughs] Not really though. It is actually my favorite Madonna song.
DAVEED: To clarify, the other two of us are fans of a lot of Madonna songs. Jonathan only likes that one. [laughs]
BEST FIT: I mean, it's also Guy Sigsworth, who I associate with Imogen Heap and Björk's Vespertine. A reasonably leftfield producer.
JONATHAN: I love this record, except for the singles, which I thought were really quite bad. Like, “American Life”, the James Bond song.
I love that tune except for the horrible ‘Sigmund Freud - analyse this’ midsection…
BILL: Yes, it’s not bad for a Bond song.
JONATHAN: It’s strange; the middle chunk of this album is so stripped down and efficient. And all of these songs have this propulsion, this incredibly narrow palette … they just drive really hard. I had this song in my mind when we were making “Keep Pushing”, because we were trying to do so much with so little.
A couple of drum sounds and this one bass line, and it made me feel like that era of Madonna production.
Also, there's a choir at the end of this track, out of nowhere. And that’s why we have strings at the end of “Keep Pushing”, because I was like… ‘It needs to explode. The sun needs to come out at the end of this song’
I sense that you do actually like some other Madonna songs…
JONATHAN: The Madonna album that I really, really loved, was Music. All those cut up stuttering guitars and auto tune; it felt so radical to me at the time. I was like, ‘Oh, she's taking all the stuff from my nerdy electronic music and putting it in these mainstream pop songs. And I didn't think those things were compatible as a teenager. I thought those were two separate worlds.
“Come Back Baby” by Pusha T
DAVEED: Bill said offhandedly one day, when we were trying to figure out what the album was about, ‘What is Pusha T doing in the Apocalypse?’ [laughs] and that became a guiding principle for all of my writing.
And this era of Pusha’s music is so simple. Expertly crafted, straight-ahead dope raps, over production with a lot of space. And when we started making “Keep Pushing”, I wanted to accomplish that. I didn’t want this song to be flashy in the way that a lot of our songs are flashy.
I wanted all the craft to be on display. And that's something that I always admire about Pusha T … without doing the tricks I fall back on - rhythm, cadence, speed. Pusha never does any of that and still manages to create these tracks that have me shaking my head.
Also, this album is a sort of mixtape. Each song could be from a completely different rapper, we just happen to have the same voice. I also could have chosen “Get Your Hustle On” by Juvenile too, which was his post- [Hurricane] Katrina, ‘FEMA didn't come through, so we're gonna sell drugs to rebuild the community’ album.
Like, what do you do post Apocalypse, if you were a hustler pre-Apocalypse?
“Club Lonely” by Lil’ Louis & The World
DAVEED: My dad used to play that record whenever he was cleaning the house - the 12 inch of this, which has six different versions of it. But it’s this version, the “Where’s the DJ” mix, that’s stuck with me. My dad’s ex-boyfriend was called Charles, so saying “Charles… my name is on the list” become a bit of an inside joke when I was younger.
BILL: You used to quote that so much when you were a little kid!
DAVEED: Yes [smiles]. When we were making the song “Mirror Shades”, I was thinking a lot about this track. Up until that point, there was this key period of ‘90s music that hadn’t been referenced on the album yet - this groovy, minimal house. And although it wasn’t as present in the cyberpunk media, it did share an idea in common: how in where do we find freedom and spirituality in this totally fucked present? And so, yes, that’s why I chose that song.
But also, I just fucking love it and I think about it all the time.
BILL: And if you think about it, queer nightclub music of the ‘80s and ‘90s was being made in an apocalypse for that community, right?
DAVEED: Right. We grew up in the bay area in the ‘90s and AIDs was a death sentence, and that whole community was being rampaged. It’s mid-Apocalypse music.
BEST FIT: I noticed this track has strangely beautiful vocals for the era, which really helps that euphoric vibe. I feel like so many of the lead vocals on house tunes from the ‘90s were painfully out of tune.
DAVEED: I do think Lil Louis’s stuff errs more on the side of ‘perfect’ somehow, than a lot of that music. It feels like he was more of a stickler for that kind of stuff.
“Bring The Noise” by Public Enemy
DAVEED: Public Enemy are incredibly important to this band's existence. But also, I wanted the vocal performance for this whole record to be more confrontational, I think.
Which is funny to say, because our music sometimes feels very confrontational, but like lyrically and vocally, it's not because of the no-first-person thing.
Basically, a lot of our projects are clipping. painting these pictures that are aggressive or scary, and you just have to sit in them. But on this, I wanted to make it feel a little more urgent and a little more like I was talking directly to you. To capture the Chuck D aesthetic.
“Raised in the Hood” by Roni Size feat. Volume 10
BILL: Well, I would say what I don't think is a truly great song in any way, is the Roni Size in Volume 10, the song from the Blade Two soundtrack. I don't think it's a bad song. I think it's a fascinating experiment.
There was a series of three film soundtrack albums in the ‘90s, put together by the music supervisor who is just some soulless executive named Happy Walters. But they were these compilation albums of original songs for movies that were these weird play dates that don't make any sense together.
The first one was Judgement Night, and it was rappers with bands, you know, Sonic Youth and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E; Mudhoney and Sir Mix-a-Lot. And they’re abominations.
The idea of making art within this weird corporate constraint, that doesn't make any sense; a creative project directed by a completely bankrupt non-creative person… smashing things together for this perceived commercial value, is a very cyberpunk idea to me.
And this track feels extra relevant to our album, because we take rap and mash it up with that late ‘90s radio electronica boom. This is is a drum and bass beat by Roni Size with Volume 10 on it - the 10th best rapper on this project; the guy who did “Pistolgrip-Pump” and nothing else. And the track’s not bad; I kind of love it. It's just a fascinating, bizarre mistake.
You can hear that Roni Size, who is a great producer, is stretching the track to make it make sense too. And it works better because it’s pretty fast. Elsewhere you’ve got Fatboy Slim and Groove Armada trying to make hip-hop beats and it doesn’t really work.
DAVEED: Yes - but the Massive Attack and Mos Def one, that is a really great song.
BILL: That’s legit. It would have been cheating if we’d picked that. [laughs]
“Track #1” from Domestic Jungle by Derek Bailey
BILL: This is actually something I truly love. On some days, this could be in my top favorite pieces of music of all time. I’ve spent more time listening to Derek Bailey than probably any other musician in my life, possibly maybe Cecil Taylor, but mostly Derek Bailey.
And reading his book [Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice] and listening to him has informed so much of how and why I make music. I don't know if you know much about him?
BEST FIT: Very little.
BILL: Well, he's an improvising guitar player, and one of the most important figures in the free improvisation movement. He was originally a jazz player, but he threw that out the window and said, ‘You know, I never want to play the same thing twice. I don't want to play outside of an idiom. I don't want to play regular rhythms. I will never play a fifth!' [laughs]. He pushes for this whole new music.”
And he's kind of compulsive. Back in the day, he’d just be walking around his apartment in Sheffield, playing all the time. And he would write ‘letters’ to people by putting a tape player on the table and talking into it while he was playing, because he never put his guitar down.
People have compiled taped letters they received from him that are a mixture of him playing, then talking into the microphone like, ‘How's your mother? How are you doing?”, then some more guitar, then “Arghhh Margaret Thatcher’s on the TV!!.
But what he also used to do was - in the ‘90s, there was a pirate radio station that played drum and bass that he would tune into, and he would play along with the drum and bass. And he became really, really into it for a while. He did an interview where he talked about it, but those tapes could never come out because they didn't know how to even ask for the rights, how to track down what DJ was playing etc.
That said, I think I figured out what the track featured in this piece was, it’s called “War in 94” by Bad Man. A super old jungle track. I tracked it down by figuring out two of the samples and then working backwards…
He passed away more than 10 years ago, and these tapes were just sort of unearthed… I guess they could be released because they figured no one was going to sue at this point. And I love that this album sounds like a transmission; tuning into something you can barely hear that you don't really understand, and you don't know the origin of.
I think that informs a lot of how we want this album to feel - making your art on top of some other art, creating this weird cross-cultural conversation. I mean, Derek at this point is this cranky old jazz guy who's becoming super interested in what young Black Londoners are making, but he doesn't even know that that's what it is. It just came through magically on his radio.”
Derek’s full of that sense of wonder and mystery, and it mirrors the way I heard electronic music for the first time, in high school.
I can't tell you what it used to feel like to hear Aphex Twin in 96 and have absolutely no idea how any of the sounds were made. I couldn't even picture it in my head. There's an old Conan O'Brien joke about a guy playing air instruments, but he's never seen real instruments, so for a guitar solo he’s just pretending to pull levers. And that's how it was for me. Is this guy pulling levels? Chains above his head? I had no idea. And that was magical.
JONATHAN: At the time, there was such cheekiness amongst those guys. They would lie in interviews about everything all the time. Like, ‘Oh, Bogdan Raczynski made this record while homeless in Tokyo, pulling computers out of the trash’. There was this romanticism, this mystique and … Fuck you-ness to all of that stuff.
BEST FIT: I swear I saw one of those guys featured on Tomorrow’s World when I was a kid.
BILL: That was an era where we thought the future of music was people with expertise who knew stuff that the public didn't. And now AI music is the opposite. AI music says: ‘Music is hard, isn't it? Wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to make any of it?’ That's the way they're selling it to us. That's our anti AI position.
“Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik”, Side A by DJ Q-Bert
BILL: The figure of the turntablist and the figure of the hacker are both people who, in the late '80s/early '90s, became these counter cultural figures. Partly for how severely they void the warranty on the technology they buy right? Like they're using technology incorrectly, for means the designers did not intend.
It’s funny… or sad, really. Because of the lockdown on sample clearances and how much they cost now, we are always trying to get our music that feels the way a Public Enemy record feels, with layers and layers and layers of different samples on it.
But the way that works now, you sample one song, and they want 50% of your publishing for that song. And if you sample three songs, there isn’t 150% of publishing available [laughs]. It's all this stupid legality; being on the phone, endlessly working out splits and deals. So we definitely try to achieve a sort of density and a feeling of piling together elements that don't necessarily go. But we can only ever afford, like, one sample at a time.
So something like this track, which has 200 samples, and him scratching over the whole thing in ‘94 too. I mean, he was so young on that one! I had the CD reissue in the late ‘90s and I didn't realise it was already four or five years old and that he was just a kid when he made it.
Q-Bert’s whole crew - Invisibl Skratch Piklz - were huge contributors to the history of turntablism and the turntable as an instrument. They thought they were jazz players. They were a group of Filipino teenagers in Daly City, just outside of San Francisco, who, because their families threw big parties, all started learning to DJing.
Growing up in the Bay, I used to go see turntablist shows all the time. I had an Invisibl Skratch Piklz signed poster on my wall in high school. I saw A-Trak open for Souls of Mischief when he was 13, and all he did was his DMC-winning DJ set. He won the DMC so young.
DAVEED: We were both at that show right? That was the first concert I'd ever been to without a parent.
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