Rammstein - Sonne (808 Remix)

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

Megamix i made using Audacity.

Mixes up together trance/rock/techno/rap/hip hop.

Includes songs by: Sirenia, Evanescence, Linkin Park, Jay-Z, Korn, Xzibit, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg.

Feel free to download!

- DJ Put Fire

DJ Put Fire - From Nobody to a Superstar (Evanescence,Linkin Park,Jay-Z,Korn,Xzibit,Dre,Snoop Dogg)

vocals by Derrick "Baseck" Estrada and Sara Taylor
additional sounds by Christopher Fleeger

Contracted: Phase II - End Credits

Down in the sea

Cooling Prongs is Christopher Fleeger—a musician, composer, field recordist, documentary filmmaker, foley artist, uh… sound guy for comedy shows in LA, and so many other things. He contributed several of the unusual nature recordings heard in our song “Dream,” including the buzzy microphone interference caused by electric fish in the Amazon river. I don’t even know how to describe his remix of “Ends”—it’s an insane piece of pop/concrète with an epic sense of scale. Fleeger is a mad genius.

Ends (Cooling Prongs Remx)

    A sample from the (hopefully) forthcoming compilation "2in Ear Labs presents Mindless Mashups", featuring the Youth of America's (and Europe's as well, I suppose) favorite party band, Mindless Self Indulgence. So far, things are slowly developing on the progress of it, as I am scant on MSI pellas right now. But I should be able to scrape some more from the source material. But I won't be relying solely on pellas for this comp. Some mashes will have whole MSI intrumentals in them, or, in some cases , bits and pieces of them stitched together. If things don't go according to plan, I'll just release the tracks I've already done as is, individually. 
    In the meantime, there is a second compilation I'm working on. And I'm just about halfway through with it. So as it stands, I may get that one done before the MSI comp. I'm keeping the details on it hush-hush. But I will give you one hint on it: think old-school industrial. 

Since U Breathe 2 Video (Kelly Clarkson vs The Prodigy vs Mindless Self Indulgence)

Barpieces are audio scores of twelve computer music inventions worked out by Charles Engstrom and Christopher Fleeger

Ideas about gathering places as social and sonic resonators group this material. More narrowly, the focus became computer music performances which could maintain some revelatory utility in the hurly-burly of ordinary public listening-- in a barroom, for instance. The resulting pieces are formally simple, relatively short in duration, and try to maintain distinct timbral surfaces.

Methods include the gas laws, lissajous curves, set transformations and fourier harmonizations of the ambience in performance spaces. The sonics range from simple synthetic waveforms, excited glass, wood and metal to slot machines, washers and other timbral pointers to the everyday world of the early 21st century.

(a piece is a note is a piece-- elephants all the way down)

Theory runs thick in computer music. Come to think of it, a brisk commerce in signal is a symptom of noisy neighborhoods in general. This is understandable enough. How many other reasonably honest choices are there when confronted with an experience shortage? The whole computing machine dance up until now has been so short-- like a baby accumulating half-truths. Well, if the commonweal's experience-cupboard is bare, then fill it. Should be a perfect playground for fools.

Our doing this surely must have been kicked along both by the dissatisfaction with sleepwalking and by some growing appreciation of the edge as panacea. But our simplest and least obscure motive has probably been curiosity about how musical performance works when it is done on computing machines. When the timbre space goes infinite and has a memory, how do you go about assembling a meaningful piece of time for some particular group of people at some particular place?

The relative scarcity of cliche (both social and musical) in computer music creates this situation where a framework for listening somehow needs to be generated at the same time as it is filled with sound-- context and content made more or less simultaneously. There is this beautiful similarity to the historical interplay between worldly conundrums and abstract mathematics. It has been more than interesting to notice that this interplay turns out to be sampling in disguise.

The ambit of all this is really the same one music has always had: to set up a situation where the air shakes in a certain way and begins to give off inevitability outside of human language.




A Current Map

Lana Del Rey - Live at The Heineken Music Hall

A Current Map

fleeger