clipping. With Christopher Fleeger: Double Live

- To wistfully turn back the hands of time, it's been one exact year since I lauded praise on There Existed An Addiction To Blood, post-rap trio Clipping's tribute album to the various depictions of horror in art. I've had a promo copy for Visions of Bodies Being Burned, the just-released and similarly-wordy sequel for two months now, but barely touched the thing. Let me explain.

Clipping's production back-end consists of William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, true post-modern artists who translate their backgrounds in noise music and the classical avant-garde into some of hip-hop's most rule-breaking production efforts. Each release across their decade-long career has come loaded with genre-mashing ideas I've never heard anyone else attempt.

I'm sure this new album is full of similarly groundbreaking moments, but I've been busy digesting Double Live, a collaboration with experimental sound artist Christopher Fleeger. Released at the end of August for collectible consumerist crapshoot Record Store Day, the album blends recordings from an entire tour's worth of Clipping live shows into a dissociative auditory trip that fragments physical space at every turn. Fleeger accompanied the group throughout their 2017 US tour supporting The Flaming Lips and, armed with an array of high-end recording devices, proceeded to collate audio of the venues themselves across hours of live performance.

To clarify, this man stuck hydrophones down sink-holes, lapel mics on security guards, contacts on pipes, and directional recorders tied to the trees outside. It's an absolutely absurd concept for a record but, in using their own shows as source material, Hutson and Fleeger have chopped together a live album like no other. The tracklist consists primarily of Clipping songs recut from a thousand different angles, offering up moments of self-referential genius like the bar-to-bar beat-switching on Baby Don't Sleep, or Inside Out's sharp chorus cuts to outside the building walls.

Then there's the multiple versions of Get Up, recorded from the backstage bathroom, an upstairs motel between heavy snores, and the inside an elephant seal enclosure as they yelp and howl. It's so knowingly tongue in cheek, grappling with listener expectations and playing a round of kick-to-kick. My mind was melted yet again on Work Work, where MC Daveed Diggs commands the crowd to "shout out wherever you're from in the world". What follows is a purgatorial wall of noise as thousands of screams are layered atop each other in a blindsiding call and response.

Interspersed between these flipped takes from Clipping's discography are Fleeger's interludes, which work to build and distort a sense of place throughout the recordings. There's roadies heckling Daveed's flow, a train passing overhead, and humourous conversations in the crowd about whether Clipping's recordings are actually... clipping.

Better known these days for his theatrical work, Daveed Diggs cements his place here as the long-term vocal front of Clipping. I earmarked Diggs' 'robotic flows' as a sticking point in my last review, but upon cracking the seal of Visions, his cadence, tone, and delivery immediately read as unlistenable. On Double Live however, the 'straight man' angle of rapping contrasts wonderfully in each recording context, as tracks flit between musique concrete and field recording.

Not sure how much else I can say about Double Live, it's a wholly unique document you really just have to hear. As someone whose enjoyment of Clipping has been steadily declining with each release, this document justifies their whole career and then some, presenting one of the most unbelievable live album experiences ever made

- Boddhi Farmer.