Clipping has delivered an incredible at-home performance for NPR Music’s “Tiny Desk Meets SXSW” concert. The remote performance features, quite possibly, the tiniest desks to ever appear in the series, and includes highlights from the band’s acclaimed albums Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), along with their Wriggle EP (2016) and debut mixtape midcity (2013).
 
NPR Music says, “Leave it to Clipping to innovate around the central notion of the Tiny Desk; to take the series’ emphasis on close-up intimacy and transport it to new heights of, well, tininess. This is, after all, a band that contains multitudes. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes craft a bed of hip-hop, industrial music and noisy experimentalism, then set loose rapper Daveed Diggs, whose violent imagery summons ’90s horrorcore and a thousand bloody movies. The band’s last two album titles — There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned — offer up a sense of the vibe, but Diggs’ gift for rapid-fire wordplay also acts as a leavening agent (see NPR Music April 18th).”
 
The “Tiny Desk” concert was recorded, edited, and mixed by Clipping. It was directed and edited by Cristina Bercovitz, who also fabricated the tiny furniture for the performance. The footage was filmed by Bercovitz, Erin Bates, and Daveed Diggs, and also features additional drums by Chukwudi Hodge.
 
New York Times says of the performance, “The avant-hip-hop group led by the “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs appeared in a showcase selected by NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, and took “tiny” as a video mandate. As Diggs rapped into a thumbnail-size microphone, his collaborators, Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, pretended (on split screens) to play miniature versions of (among other things) a laptop, guitar pedals and a windup music box, as the music warped itself from pink noise to music-box tinkle to industrial distortion to techno beats. No simulation was involved in the tour de force that was Diggs’s breakneck, virtually nonstop rapping, with rhymes that raced from free-associative wordplay to nightmare imagery to a grimly prescient 2019 song, ‘Nothing Is Safe.’ (see March 22nd Critics Notebook)”
 
Clipping’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned, There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Wriggle, are available now worldwide from Sub Pop. The self-released midcity is also available at all DSPs.
 
What people are saying about Clipping’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned:
“If Run the Jewels are the polemicist poets facing America’s racial reckoning with six-foot-high spray-painted lettering, Clipping’s members are the academics connecting the horrors of the country’s past with thumbtacks and string…There Existed an Addiction to Blood” from 2019 and Visions of Bodies Being Burned — sew the group’s socially conscious threads through the gory narratives of ’90s “horrorcore” rap artists like Brotha Lynch Hung and Ganksta N-I-P.” - New York Times
 
“In the group’s ambitious new horror-themed album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned’ each song plays into one of the genre’s tropes, occasionally as an expression of radical politics. Nowhere is this overlap more effective than on “Pain Everyday,” which calls on the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the descendants of their killers.” - The New Yorker
 
“Clipping’s finest refinement yet of their abrasive horror-rap.” ★★★★- MOJO
 
“Like a mind-melting experimental audiobook, fitting as comfortably in the club as it does in the headphones.” - The Wire
 
“Throughout, Clipping stun and shock with their most complete work to date, and Visions of Bodies Being Burned proves the group to be as dynamic as they are devastating (9/10).” - Loud & Quiet
 
“This is a once-in-a-generation band reaching their peak.” ★★★★ - DIY

“Few listening experiences this year are as gripping, visceral, and vivid as Visions of Bodies Being Burned (8.5./10).”- Under the Radar
 
“Visions of Bodies Being Burned is an album that will cement clipping.’s reputation as one of the most exciting and visionary groups working in music today (8/10).” - CLASH
 
“Not many acts find the midway point between Wolf Eyes and Three 6 Mafia, but by the time Visions reaches its apex at the brutal centerpiece “Looking Like Meat,” that’s exactly what clipping. sounds like. It’s a particularly threatening chapter of horrorcore that renders even some of the more severe acts that came before almost cartoonish by comparison.” ★★★★ - All Music
 
“Visions of Bodies Being Burned demands you wake up to the full horror – of clipping.’s fictional world, and the real world behind it.” ★★★★ - The Forty Five

“Visions of Bodies Being Burned reveals the records to be a kind of Frankenstein’s monster — assembled from many unlike parts and reanimated through three mad scientists’ passion. The result is a long anthology of love letters to the genre: raps to match a modern Poe, beats to leave the blood curdled, and a pair of back-to-back albums bisected, but with a still-beating heart.” - SF Weekly
 
“Clipping. delivers a series of captivating songs that are equally unsettling (8/10).” - RIFF Magazine
 
“In this diptych, I love both parts of the equation equally (get it?). I’ll pick up There Existed an Addiction To Blood if I want to feel mad and emboldened in my anger, set against the injustice of the world and our tiny piece of it. But it’s Visions that I’ll pick up if I want to feel that ghostly chill or just that indescribable feeling you get when faced with real fear, with the uncanny. Guttural fear. Visceral fear of the strange world you thought was familiar to you but turns out: you were wrong.” - Heavy Blog is Heavy
 
“Clipping. are the best, always outdoing themselves at every pass and that’s all you need to do to succeed in this life. Bra-fucking-vo.” - Everything is Noise

Clipping
Visions of Bodies Being Burned
 
Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Say the Name
3. Wytchboard (Interlude)*
4. ‘96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)
5. Something Underneath
6. Make Them Dead
7. She Bad
8. Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)*
9. Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)
10. Check the Lock
11. Looking Like Meat (feat. Ho99o9)
12. Drove (Interlude)*
13. Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)
14. Body for the Pile (with Sickness)
15. Enlacing
16. Secret Piece
*CD/digital/cassette-only tracks

Visions of Bodies Being Burned, their critically acclaimed new album is out now.

 

“Enlacing & Pain Everyday” video - CAST / CREW CREDITS

Clipping’s new single “’96 Neve Campbell” is a tribute to the self-aware “final girl” character of the post-slasher film cycle, featuring Inglewood’s Cam & China, who prove they do more than survive the masked killer—they preemptive-strike his ass. The accompanying lyric video was directed by Clipping’s Jonathan Snipes and the group’s longtime collaborator Cristina Bercovitz. “’96 Neve Campbell” is from Visions of Bodies Being Burned, the follow up to their acclaimed 2019 release There Existed an Addiction to Blood, and the second installment in its sociopolitical horrorcore series.
 
Clipping’s Daveed Diggs says of Cam & China’s contribution to “‘96 Neve Campbell”: “We’ve been fans of theirs for a long time, going back to the days when they were in the group Pink Dollaz. Cam and China continue to be some of the most consistent and under-appreciated lyricists on the West Coast. We’ve been trying to do a song with them for a while now, and this one felt like a perfect fit. They bodied it.”

Visions of Bodies Being Burned is available to preorder through Sub Pop Mega Mart. Preorders of the LP through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will receive the limited, Loser edition on mixed red/orange/yellow colored vinyl (while supplies last). Meanwhile, LP preorders of Visions of Bodies Being Burned throughout the UK and Europe from select independent retailers will receive the limited Loser edition on gold vinyl (while supplies last).

Read more about Clipping and Visions of Bodies Being Burned right over here.

Stream/Watch “Say the Name” (Lyric Video) then preorder the album -> smarturl.it/Clipping_VOBBB.

On October 23rd, 2020, Clipping will release Visions of Bodies Being Burned, the follow up to their acclaimed 2019 release There Existed an Addiction to Blood, and the second installment in its sociopolitical horrorcore series. The album, which includes the standouts “Say the Name,” “96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China),” “Pain Everyday (feat. Michael Esposito),” and “Enlacing,” was produced by Clipping, mixed by Steve Kaplan, and mastered by Rashad Becker. Visions of Bodies Being Burned also features guest appearances from Ho99o9 (“ Looking Like Meat”), Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes (“Eaten Alive”), Sickness (“Body for the Pile”) and Greg Stuart (“Invocation (Interlude)”). 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.
 
The album’s first single “Say the Name,” transforms Scarface’s evocative lyric from “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”—“Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned”—into a screwed-down Chicago ghetto house loop, mixing together a palette of inspirations including 90s industrial music and Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman. The “Say the Name” lyric video was directed by longtime visual collaborator Cristina Bercovitz.

 
Visions of Bodies Being Burned is available for preorders through Sub Pop Mega Mart. Preorders of the LP through megamart.subpop.com and select independent retailers in North America will receive the limited, Loser edition on mixed red/orange/yellow colored vinyl (while supplies last). Meanwhile, LP preorders of Visions of Bodies Being Burned throughout the UK  and Europe from select independent retailers will receive the limited Loser edition on gold vinyl (while supplies last).

 
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Clipping’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood received acclaim from the likes of Pop Matters, who said,  “Apocalyptic, claustrophobic, with danger in the air; in other words, reminiscent of our current moment in US history. Horror movie themes float amidst the background, but this is hip-hop, riddled with allusions to classics of the past while living in a now setting of vampires, zombies, and ghosts (#7, “The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2019”).” Meanwhile, Treble Zine had this to say, “There Existed an Addiction to Blood turns to horror as its conduit for dealing out home truths. Daveed Diggs remains in the highest tier of contemporary MCs in America, taking obvious joy from spinning between frisky, tongue-in-cheek junk culture references and cold, compact sucker punches of truth (#18 / “50 Best Albums of the Year”).” And Stereogum, in its “Album of the Week” review offered this, “There Existed An Addiction To Blood, even more than Clipping’s past albums, has gotten under my skin. That’s good. That’s what horror stories should do. Send in the clowns.”

[Photo credit: Damien Maloney]

About Visions of Bodies Being Burned
In the horror genre, sequels are perfunctory. As the insufferable film bro Randy explains in Scream 2, “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to create a successful sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate—more blood, more gore. Carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.” Last Halloween, Los Angeles experimental rap mainstays Clipping ended their three-year silence with the horrorcore-inspired album There Existed an Addiction to Blood. This October, rapper Daveed Diggs, and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson return with an even higher body count, more elaborate kills, and monsters that just won’t stay dead.
 
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. In the years following Splendor & Misery—the band’s acclaimed dystopian science fiction-rap epic—they simply made too many songs for one album. 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 are never critical of their cultural references. Their 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.
 
There’s a well-worn adage in film scholarship that says: Every era gets the monster it deserves—meaning during each period of history, different monsters come to embody the specific sociopolitical anxieties of the time: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and antisemitism, Godzilla and the atom bomb, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and McCarthyism, Anne Rice’s vampires and the AIDS crisis. While these figures are largely reactionary, Clipping intentionally recast their figures of monstrosity through the lens of an antiracist, antipatriarchal, anticolonial politics to address the struggles of our current era. The album’s first single, “Say the Name,” transforms Scarface’s evocative lyric from “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”—“Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned”—into a screwed-down Chicago ghetto house loop, mixing together a palette of inspirations from 90s industrial music to a certain mirror-bound, bee-keeping, hook-handed former-slave/urban legend. The second single, “’96 Neve Campbell” is a tribute to the self-aware “final girl” character of the post-slasher film cycle, featuring Inglewood’s Cam & China, who prove they do more than survive the masked killer—they preemptive-strike his ass.
 
The band also connected with fellow noise-rap pioneers Ho99o9 for the song “Looking Like Meat,” which more closely resembles the full-on sonic assault of Clipping’s first album, Midcity, than any of their music since. Among Clipping’s peers, Ho99o9 reveal themselves to be the perfect collaborators to fit into the album’s thematic world. Eaddy and theOGM deliver the most unhinged, viscerally alarming moment on the entire record.
 
Each track pairs a different expression of horror with one of Clipping’s signature metamorphic takes on a hip-hop subgenre. “Eaten Alive” pays tribute to the Tobe Hooper film of the same name, aping the swampy drag of No Limit and their ilk over a jagged jazz-rap instrumental featuring Tortoise guitar genius Jeff Parker, and experimental LA drummer Ted Byrnes. “Enlacing” posits Lovecraftian cosmic terror as the result of a psychedelic drift into nothingness, played as a smeary, cloud rap haze. “Pain Everyday” uses real EVP recordings—said to be the voices of restless spirits—atop a cinematic, Venetian Snares-like breakcore collage, as a call-to-arms for the ghosts of lynching victims to haunt the white descendants of their murderers. And “Check the Lock” is a spiritual sequel to Seagram’s classic track “Sleepin in My Nikes,” describing a drug kingpin’s paranoid descent into madness.
 
While There Existed an Addiction to Blood ended in an all-cleansing fire, Visions of Bodies Being Burned concludes with the break of dawn in a forest, providing the false hope that those who have survived the horror thus far might just be safe for good. 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 leftist 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.
 
For 2020’s Record Store Day, Clipping released Double Live, a collaboration with sound artist Christopher Fleeger. All the audio was recorded during Clipping’s 2017 tour opening for the Flaming Lips, but the microphones weren’t pointed at the band. Instead, mics were placed in toilets, taped to ceiling pipes, tied to trees, worn by roadies, hidden all over venues. The results were then synchronized and edited over more than a year. Double Live is perhaps more a musique concrète experiment than a traditional live album. On the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon said it sounded “Weird.”
 
In his “Album of the Week” review for Stereogum, Tom Breihan described There Existed an Addiction to Blood as “cold, confrontational music, even when it slaps, which it often does.” Visions of Bodies Being Burned slaps even more often than its predecessor, although perhaps the only club it will do so in will be the burnt-out, radiation-poisoned rave of some science-fiction dystopia. Their new album finds Clipping building upon the language of their already-revolutionary music, while still making the trunk rattle on dilapidated hearses and demon-possessed Plymouth Furys. Never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.

[Photo credit: Cristina Bercovitz]

U.K./European shows April 16th-May 2nd - Cartel Madras to support North American shows May 7th-22nd.

Clipping has announced headlining international tour dates for 2020 in support of There Existed an Addiction to Blood, their acclaimed album of 2019.
 
The 20-city international tour, which will include stops in the U.K., The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, the U.S., and Canada, begins April 16th in London and currently ends May 22nd in Chicago at Bottom Lounge. Festival highlights include an appearance at Ableton Loop 2020 in Berlin, DE April 24th-26th, Motel Mazique Festival in Rotterdam, NL on April 18th, and Donaufestival in Krems, DE on May 2nd. Additionally, support for the North American tour dates (May 7th-22nd) will come from Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras.
 
A special fan presale for the North American shows begin Wednesday, March 11th at 10 am (local), with tickets on sale to the general public Friday, March 13th at 10 am (local). The U.K./European shows are on sale now. For up to date information on tickets, please visit Clipping’s official website.
 
Apr. 16 - London, UK - Islington Assembly Hall
Apr. 17 - Brighton, UK - The Arch
Apr. 18 - Rotterdam, NL - Motel Mazique Festival
Apr. 20 - Lille, FR - L’Aeronoef
Apr. 21 - Paris, FR - Badaboum
Apr. 22 - Brussels, BE - Beursshouwburg
Apr. 24 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020
Apr. 25 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020
Apr. 26 - Berlin, DE - Ableton Loop 2020
Apr. 28 - Hamburg, DE - Hafenklang
Apr. 29 - Wiesbaden, DE - Schlachtnof
May 01 - Munich, DE - Rote Sonne
May 02 - Krems, DE - Donaufestival
May 07 - Los Angeles, CA - The Echoplex *
May 08 - Berkeley, CA - Cornerstone *
May 10 - Portland, OR - Star Theatre *
May 11 - Seattle, WA - Neumos *
May 15 - Montreal, QC - Bar Le Ritz *
May 16 - Toronto, ON - Adelaide Hall *
May 17 - Philadelphia, PA - Underground Arts *
May 19 - Brooklyn, NY - Music Hall of Williamsburg *
May 20 - Boston, MA - Brighton Music Hall *
May 22 - Chicago, IL - Bottom Lounge *
 
* w/ Cartel Madras

 
Clipping’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood earned placement on “Best Albums of 2019” lists from the likes of The Wire, The Needledrop, Passion of the Weiss, PopMatters (albums + best hip-hop), Treble Zine, The Line of Best Fit, Loud & Quiet, Genius, RIFF Magazine, Sputnikmusic, and more. Pop Matters says of the record, “Apocalyptic, claustrophobic, with danger in the air (“Nothing Is Safe”); in other words, reminiscent of our current moment in US history. Horror movie themes float amidst the background, but this is hip-hop, riddled with allusions to classics of the past while living in a now setting of vampires, zombies, and ghosts. (#7, “The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2019”). Meanwhile, Treble Zine offers this, “There Existed an Addiction to Blood turns to horror as its conduit for dealing out home truths. Daveed Diggs remains in the highest tier of contemporary MCs in America, taking obvious joy from spinning between frisky, tongue-in-cheek junk culture references and cold, compact sucker punches of truth (#18 / “50 Best Albums of the Year”).”
 
There Existed an Addiction to Blood, which features the singles  “Nothing Is Safe,”  “La Mala Ordina,” “All in Your Head,” and “Blood of the Fang,”  was produced by Clipping, mixed by Steve Kaplan, and mastered by Dave Cooley at Elysium Masters in Los Angeles. The album also features appearances from Ed Balloon, Benny the Butcher, Elcamino, La Chat, The Rita, and Pedestrian Deposit, and a composition from Andrea Lockwood.

On Record Store Day (April 18th), Clipping will also release Double Live, a collaboration with composer Christopher Fleeger, available in a stunning industrial double-picture-disc package. This is not a standard live album. All the audio was recorded during Clipping’s 2017 tour, but the microphones weren’t pointed at the band. Instead they were in toilets, taped to ceiling pipes, tied to trees, worn by roadies—hidden all over venues. The results were then synchronized and edited over more than a year. Double Live is an impossible performance heard by hundreds of disembodied ears—part live album, part tour document, part musique concrète piece.