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’sThere Existed an Addiction to Bloodreceived 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.
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.
You can now hear Clipping’s “Aquacode Databreaks” (feat. Shabazz Palaces), a new track from the group’s forthcoming single “The Deep,” available on DL/12” vinyl worldwide on Friday, November 29th through Sub Pop. Listen via YouTube - Spotify - Apple Music - Bandcamp
Both the vinyl and digital versions include two unreleased extra tracks (the aforementioned “Aquacode Databreaks,” and “Drownt”), while the vinyl edition also includes instrumental versions of all three tracks.
Clipping’s “The Deep” is a dark sci-fi tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women thrown off slave ships and based on the mythology of Detroit electronic group Drexciya.
The song was originally commissioned for a This American Life episode about Afrofuturism in 2017. “The Deep” also earned Clipping a nomination for a 2018 Hugo award, and the band constructed a sound installation based on “The Deep” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
The 12” single comes on the heels of the November 5th release of The Deep, a novella by the two-time Astounding (formerly John W. Campbell) Award-nominated author Rivers Solomon (with Clipping credited as co-authors) inspired by the title track and published by Saga Press.
Clipping “The Deep” 12” single
Tracklisting: 1. The Deep 2. Aquacode Databreaks (feat. Shabazz Palaces) 3. Drownt 4. The Deep (Instrumental)* 5. Aquacode Databreaks (Instrumental)* 6. Drownt (Instrumental)* *vinyl-only
In further exciting news, Clipping also graces the cover of the forthcoming December issue of The Wire.
Clipping’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood, the group’s acclaimed new album, is out now on CD, 2xLP, cassette, and a 2xLP Deluxe Limited “Lamestain” Edition from Sub Pop. The blood-splattered “Lamestain” edition is sold out online, and will only be available at select independent record stores, and via the band’s merch table at shows (while supplies last). Clipping will perform at the Adult Swim Festival on November 16th in Los Angeles. Additional live dates to be announced soon.
Clipping has delivered an intense and hallucinatory new video for “All In Your Head,” directed by C Prinz (Tinashe, Miya Folick), a standout from There Existed an Addiction to Blood, the group’s acclaimed new album. The visual stars rapper Robyn Hood and Counterfeit Madison singer Sharon Udoh (who both guest on the track), along with dancer Jazz Washington and model/DJ Jantae Spinks.
C Prinz offers this, “‘All In Your Head’ is a surrealist portrait of the female experience embodied. I was deeply inspired by a line from an Amiri Baraka poem: ‘Lately, I’ve been accustomed to the way the ground opens up and envelopes me.’ I wanted to create something that felt authentic to the emotional landscape of the female-identifying. With this video, my goal was to get people to feel the imagery instead of just see it. This video is a pure representation of trust and community—it would not have been possible without the unconditional commitment of the cast, crew and the creative freedom Clipping and Sub Pop encouraged.”
Clipping add, “‘All In Your Head’ is the furthest we’ve taken the fracturing of single-point perspective in our storytelling. It was important to us to give over control and authorship of this particular video to our collaborators. We don’t appear in it and had virtually no input in its creation. And because we cannot take credit for any of it, we have no problem saying that C Prinz and her team have made a fucking masterpiece.”
Clipping will perform at the Adult Swim Festival on November 16th in Los Angeles. Additional live dates to be announced soon.
There Existed an Addiction to Blood is out now on CD, 2xLP, cassette, and a 2xLP Deluxe Limited “Lamestain” Edition from Sub Pop. The blood-splattered “Lamestain” edition is sold out online, and will only be available at select independent record stores, and via the band’s merch table at shows (while supplies last).
The “Blood of the Fang” visual is inspired by a photo of Huey Newton — co-founder of The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense — hand-cuffed to a hospital gurney while being treated for a gunshot wound in the abdomen after a gun battle with Oakland police in October 1967.
The song itself is built around a sample from Sam Waymon’s score to the 1973 experimental vampire film Ganja & Hess. Daveed Diggs’s lyrics conjure an alternate history of black political struggle in the 1960s and 70s, name-dropping radical activists and reimagining them as a pantheon of undead superheroes fighting against systems of oppression.
Clipping recently announced their first headlining shows in nearly 3 years: October 8th-November 16th (see dates below), the band will perform in support of their new album, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, out October 18th on CD, 2xLP, cassette, and a limited-edition, blood-splattered “Lamestain” vinyl 2xLP.
[2xLP Deluxe Limited “Lamestain” Edition]
The band, whose October 9th show at Brooklyn’s Zone One at Elsewhere is now sold-out, just added an in-store at Rough Trade NYC on October 8th. Fans who pre-order the new album via Rough Trade will receive two passes to the in-store, and those who show up day-of can purchase the album for a single pass to the in-store. (Day-of purchases/entry will be on a first-come, first-served basis.) The blood-splattered “Lamestain” vinyl edition is sold out online, and will only be available at the in-store, at select independent record stores, and via the band’s merch table at shows.
Oct. 08 - Brooklyn, NY - Rough Trade NYC [7 pm - All Ages] Oct. 09 - Brooklyn, NY - Zone One at Elsewhere [Sold Out] Oct. 10 - Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall Oct. 11 -Toronto, ON - The Garrison * Oct. 14 - Oakland, CA - The New Parish Nov. 16 - Los Angeles, CA - Adult Swim Festival *w/ Cartel Madras
Headlining shows for October 2019 in Brooklyn, DC, Toronto, and Oakland also announced.
Clipping has delivered a lyric video for “La Mala Ordina”, a new single featuring rappers Benny The Butcher (Griselda/Shady Records) and Elcamino (Black Soprano Family), and harsh noise artist The Rita. The lyric video was made by the band itself, with Cristina Bercovitz. The track is a standout from Clipping’s forthcoming album,There Existed an Addiction to Blood, available on Friday, October 18th worldwide from Sub Pop.
There Existed an Addiction to Blood finds Clipping interpreting another rap splinter sect through their singular lens. This is Clipping’s transmutation of horrorcore, a purposefully absurdist and creatively significant sub-genre that flourished in the mid-90s. If some of its most notable pioneers included Brotha Lynch Hung and Gravediggaz, it also encompasses seminal works from the Geto Boys, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the near-entirety of classic Memphis cassette tape rap.
The most subversive and experimental rap has often presented itself as an “alternative” to conventional sounds, but Clipping respectfully warp them into new constellations. There Existed an Addiction to Blood absorbs the hyper-violent horror tropes of the Murder Dog era, but re-imagines them in a new light: still darkly-tinted and somber, but in a weirder and more vivid hue. If traditional horrorcore was akin to Blacula, the hugely popular blaxploitation flick from the early 70s, Clipping’s latest is analogous to Ganja & Hess, the blood-sipping 1973 cult classic regarded as an unsung landmark of black independent cinema, whose score by Sam Waymon, the band samples on “Blood of the Fang” and inspired the album’s title.
There Existed an Addiction to Blood features the singles “Nothing Is Safe,” “Blood of the Fang,” and the aforementioned “La Mala Ordina,” and 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, La Chat, Counterfeit Madison, and Pedestrian Deposit.
[Photo credit: Cristina Bercorvitz]
Clipping Tour Dates + Ticket Links
Clipping has just announced their first headlining shows in nearly 3 years in support of There Existed an Addiction to Blood which span October 9th in Brooklyn at Zone One at Elsewhere and currently end October 14th in Oakland at The New Parish. Additionally, the band will perform on Saturday, November 16th at the 2019 Adult Swim Festival in Los Angeles.
Oct. 09 - Brooklyn, NY - Zone One at Elsewhere Oct. 10 - Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall Oct. 11 -Toronto, ON - The Garrison Oct. 14 - Oakland, CA - The New Parish Nov. 16 - Los Angeles, CA - Adult Swim Festival
