Album Review: Dead Channel Sky by clipping.

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.

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Fresh new skin for the avatar, just plugged in to the boulevard Trying to explain exactly what clipping. is to a casual rap enthusiast is a slackline I've found myself toppling off more times than I'd like to admit. The most accurate analogy I've come up with so far is that of station surfing on a dusty old analogue radio before happening upon a bizarre yet serendipitous sweet spot in between two frequencies.

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Equal parts thrilling and tedious, Dead Channel Sky is a cybernetic haze of industrial wreckage and conceptual overreach that occasionally forgets to have fun, mistaking clutter for complexity. The album leans into a Commodore 64-era cyberpunk aesthetic, even sampling John Akomfrah's Afrofuturist film The Last Angel of History. Conversely, Mirrorshades pt.

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Last year marked a four-decade anniversary since William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, with its frenzied neologisms, infected our thinking about digital culture. Album Dead Channel Sky by LA experimental rap shapeshifters Clipping comes as a delayed present. Clipping use the novel's opening sentence ("The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel") as a portal to an adrenaline-fuelled Gibsonian sonic fan fiction, which meshes Afrofuturism with sounds from the hardcore continuum.

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Cyberpunk currently stands as the last great popular vision of the future. Since its emergence in the early 1980s, via novels by the likes of William Gibson and films such as Blade Runner, the sci-fi aesthetic has really never gone away; just look at the popularity of the recent Cyberpunk 2077 game . The continued prevalence and relevance of this distinctly eighties aesthetic (cyberpunk's core signifiers of neon lights, synthesiser music and emerging globalisation were all distinctly of the time and place of its creation) is a damning indictment of capitalism's inability to conjure a more cohesive or simply better popular idea of the future across the last 50+ years.

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That there's a heady combination of noises on a clipping. record, two decades into the experimental hip hop outfit's existence, isn't anything particularly notable, but there's a specific quality to the selection of sounds the trio have collated on 'Dead Channel Sky' that evokes a very specific Y2K retrofuturist thread: the sound of a dial-up modem introduces the record, while 'Change The Channel' combines with the type of industrial percussion and synth tones that hint at '90s video game soundtracks. This - with its ability to evoke the excitable, positive energy of the early possibilities of the internet for a mass audience (worth mentioning here is the utterly pleasing delivery of "mainframe" on 'Go') - has the devastating consequence of throwing a gut-punch infinitely more effective than any of the laments on 'doomscrolling' or 'screen time' that are offered in conveyor belt quantities elsewhere.

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