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.
Clipping are the most qualified to do it, if we consider them being the only rap group nominated twice for the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious prize for science fiction writers and editors. Some of their previous albums, 2016’s Splendor & Misery, a dark Afrofuturist take on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 2017’s The Deep, inspired by the Drexciyan myth about an underwater resistance born out of the Black Atlantic, were recognised in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation. Every Clipping member – rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes – has a background in theatre or film production. They have a good sense for drama and storytelling.
Previously, Diggs claustrophobically spat bars onto nervous instrumentals made of samples of alarm clocks (as on their 2014 debut album CLPPNG), or the group closed their albums by performing contemporary classical pieces (like including Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Burning’ on their 2019 record There Existed an Addiction to Blood), but their latest, Dead Channel Sky, is something you can safely blast on the car radio while on the highway. It blends sounds from the hardcore continuum, like jungle, breakbeat and acid, with West Coast hip-hop and sounds of phreaking (hacking telephones) to show what it would approximately sound like if Ice T’s J Bone from Johnny Mnemonic had a musical project besides underground resistance.
‘Dominator’ sets the scene, showing the dystopian city with neon lights, where you can carry “consciousness in a memory stick” and ads are projected up in the sky. The acid breakbeat track ‘Change the Channel’ brings the action, with its high-octane energy resembling ‘Fire Starter’ by The Prodigy. Although Dead Channel Sky takes the 1984 novel as its main inspiration, it aesthetically stays largely around the mid-1990s. Moody track ‘Code’ – one of the album’s highlights – uses narrated samples from the 1996 video essay The Last Angel of History by the Black Audio Film Collective, in which the main protagonist, Data Thief, travels through time to dig fragments of code – assembled from artefacts left by Detroit techno, Sun Ra or Octavia Butler – that open up the future.
Compared with the recently reissued Neuromancer by New York duo Black Rain, who soundtracked the audiobook narrated by Gibson with neo-noir industrial soundscapes in 1994, Dead Channel Sky doesn’t leave much space for the imagination, as it constantly overloads you with images. It paints a picture of shady corporations and raincoat-clad hackers but makes it feel more like Grand Theft Auto. Unlike the brilliant Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost, co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, which uncovered the whole post-colonial circuit that enables cyberculture, set in a hacker village made of computer waste mined and dumped in East Africa, Dead Channel Sky doesn’t introduce any radical new ideas and rather stays with the source material. However, in times when Gibson’s futures have already aged and some of his villains shape politics, Clipping revoke cyberpunk’s countercultural charge with extraordinary energy.
