clipping., 'Dead Channel Sky' Album Review

On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. Ask What Happened

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“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The opening line of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is as evocative as it is vague. When Gibson references the static snow of pre-millennium tube televisions, he is essentially saying the sky is gray. But, he likely also meant to evoke that unnameable and disorienting sense of dread induced by menacing white noise and crawling black and white granules of light.

Dead Channel Sky, the fifth studio album from experimental LA hip-hop trio clipping.—rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Bill Hutson and Jonathan Snipes—uses Gibson’s port sky as its first aesthetic touchstone. The concept is at once familiar and alien. Cyberpunk, a literary movement which began in earnest with Neuromancer, offers a version of the future where our obsession with technology has advanced at the expense of everything else, where worlds shine like chrome, sound like digital noise, and feel like the end of everything.

Dead Channel Sky is clipping.’s first foray into cyberpunk, though it almost feels like an inevitability. Generally defined by its focus on “low-life and high tech,” cyberpunk is obviously fertile ground for clipping., whose combinations of expertly produced noise and sharply observant storytelling have found the threesome exploring tales of degradation, cruelty and hope through Afrofuturist and horrorcore lenses, tuned precisely to cultural moments past and present.

The groundwork for Dead Channel Sky was laid in 2019, when the group was invited to contribute a song to a cyberpunk themed video game. Though they didn’t finish the song (album single “Run It”) in time for it to be included, they liked it enough to build an entire record around it. Thanks to clipping.’s masterful ability to immerse their listeners in conceptual world-building, it’s easy to imagine the driving beat of “Run It” and the rest of the album’s songs soundtracking the chrome and neon dystopias the band pulls from.

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Dead Channel Sky’s “Intro” drops listeners in with no warning—as with previous records, we’re greeted by Diggs introducing the album in that coldly menacing tone, supported only by a bed of noise. Here, it’s the grating ring of a dial-up modem, distorted even further by Hutson and Snipes’s characteristic use of musique concrète. Diggs ends the intro with the group’s signature phrase—“It’s clipping., bitch”—for the first time in full since their Sub Pop label debut CLPPNG (which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year), the phrase now sounding less like a brash entrance and more like a pointed warning.

clipping.’s detractors have often criticized the group for a perceived inaccessibility in their music and approach, due in part to the barrage of samples and references built into clipping.’s creative DNA. To those critics’ credit, it is overwhelming. But on Dead Channel Sky especially, overload is the point. And for those who take an interest in rabbit holes, there are endless tunnels to explore.

Like all of clipping.’s albums, Dead Channel Sky is dense and structured through layers of reference. The band has always worked from a concept-forward perspective, and the songs here are littered with the vocabulary of the very same ‘80s science fiction the album it draws inspiration from; the three music videos released so far (“Run It,” “Change the Channel,” and “Welcome Home Warrior”) also borrow the lo-fi cyber aesthetic of films like Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix. Aside from the nod to Neuromancer in the album’s title, the hard-hitting “Code” also contains a number of other Neuromancer hallmarks, including a dangerous psychoactive drug called Blue Nine, emphasizing the album’s running theme of disengagement—from reality or from oneself.

The silky, uncharacteristically buoyant house track ”Mirrorshades pt. 2,” which features the hypnotic voices of Canadian hip-hop duo Cartel Madras, references both the 1986 cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades and Information Society’s 1990 song “Mirrorshades,” an ode to Gibson’s recurring character Molly Millions (aka Razorgirl), who Diggs also namedrops in “Code.” Additionally, much of the album’s sonic landscape contains the building blocks of ‘80s electro, a genre born out of early hip-hop in New York that also tended toward Afrofuturist, science fiction-based aesthetics.

Dead Channel Sky is often deeply reminiscent of CLPPNG, where the group explored the building blocks of West Coast hip-hop through lyrical and sonic references, as well as subject matter that discussed the politics of survival amidst violence, drugs and city life. Though Dead Channel Sky’s cyberpunk theme technically puts the album into the speculative realm of storytelling clipping.’s last three albums used, it feels far more rooted in the “real” than the far-flung space travel of 2016’s Splendor & Misery or the bloody, haunted double-feature of horrorcore records There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019) and Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020).

Dead Channel Sky also differs musically from its past three predecessors in a few vital ways. Perhaps intentionally designed to parallel the lightspeed pace and casual violence so often present in cyberpunk narratives, the album cuts back on the lengthy interludes that made some of clipping.’s previous records more of a sit-down experience. The interludes are still present—it wouldn’t be a clipping. album without them. However, tracks like “Go,” “Madcap,” and “Mood Organ,” which still feature Diggs rapping but clock in under the two minute mark, feel like commentary on the digital-age attention spans that have lead pop artists like Sabrina Carpenter or PinkPantheress to make intentionally short songs. Even the interludes that are instrumental (like “Malleus,” featuring Wilco’s Nels Cline) or mostly just noise (both “Simple Degradation” tracks and the only official interludes “From Bright Bodies” and “And You Called”) feel more in service to the idea of the album as a soundtrack—radio static, half-heard messages, and harsh computer noises all add to the ambiance, their presence feeling fully justified.

Even more notably, Dead Channel Sky prioritizes more traditional beats and song structures—there’s never too long of a wait for the satisfying hit of a backbeat snare, and while the album is their longest yet (20 songs), it rarely feels like anything close to a slog. Take, for example, the techno buildup and beat drop on “Dominator,” the album’s first full track after its introduction. The song samples the 1991 Human Resource song of the same name, using the original song’s line “I’m the one and only dominator” like a gear shift as the song builds in intensity. It roils and rumbles and then explodes, only for its sparks to immediately ignite the rough, frenetic pulse of “Change the Channel.”

In other moments, Diggs’ machine-gun vocal precision skitters across the top of a drum ‘n’ bass beat on the uneasy hacker story “Dodger” and jumpstarts the glitchy engine of “Run It.” Even when the pace slows, like on the penultimate track “Welcome Home Warrior” (featuring the great Aesop Rock, whose wry and conversational flow is a clear influence on Diggs), the intensity doesn’t diminish. If anything, it makes the juxtaposition of genuinely fun dance beats and frequently dark lyrics all the more potent.

If the pixelated cybercore of Dead Channel Sky feels a little too on the nose, or some of the details a tad anachronistic, there’s a reason for that. The truest brilliance of Dead Channel Sky is what it asks of its listeners as they slip through tales of digital isolation, surveillance, and desperate people: Isn’t this all a little too familiar? As modern readers are returning to Octavia Butler’s alarmingly well-forecasted 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, where there is not only a neo-fascist political leader using the phrase “Make America Great Again,” but also a vision of Los Angeles burning apocalyptically to the ground, clipping. layers the ominously prescient cyber-fueled worlds of the ‘80s and ‘90s atop our present one like an uncanny augmented reality game.

On the album’s final track “Ask What Happened,” Diggs unplugs the listener from the illusion and drops the pretense of futuristic tour guide, instead traveling at breakneck speed through history both real and imagined. Bombs and natural disasters pile up beside widening wage gaps and the technological detritus of a culture that can’t stop sprinting toward its own demise, and is running out of room—“Getting hard to imagine expanding a thought / When there’s not any breathing space,” Diggs says, rapping at tongue-twister speed like he’s running out of air.

“Ask What Happened” doesn’t ask listeners a question; it spells out what they may have already surmised, that we are already living under Gibson’s dead channel sky. The thought experiments of ‘80s and ‘90s science fiction are (almost) the reality we’re living now, and that might make it feel like it’s too late to even bother asking the question. But clipping. seem to have been guided by Butler’s ideologies about writing science fiction. In her essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” published in 2000, she says that “there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

The world of Dead Channel Sky is not pretty or encouraging, and casual listening might result in a more cynical understanding of clipping.’s attitudes. But clipping. have asked us to do what Butler did, and what the best science fiction writers have always demanded we do: understand our place in time, identifying the cracks that have allowed the fault lines to widen. And then, ask ourselves if we could be one of the answers.

Read: “How clipping. Hacked Life’s Glitching Contradictions”

On Dead Channel Sky, clipping. Ask What Happened

On their most immediate and vital album yet, the LA rap trio reimagine a cyberpunk-inspired present and future.