Bill Hutson of clipping. admits their brand of unrelenting nightmare rap is a plot to destroy Daveed Diggs
You can’t put words on clipping. and it is a fool’s errand to try. The three-piece exists somewhere between wildly disparate spheres of influence. Early on, critics tried to lump them into the rarely used “horrorcore” tag, as their subject matter is often dark, disturbing, and on the narratively spooky side. But that genre is silly, and reductive, as is the case of most other words you could try to simplify them down to. This contributes, in part, to how difficult it is for fans of the group to sell strangers on getting clipping. into their ears, posthaste.
They’ve self-described as a rap group, and from the brutally unforgiving, sonic barrier-breaking verse of lead singer Daveed Diggs, that would track. But he’s got other outlets for that. Bill Hutson comes from the world of harsh ambient digital walls of noise, and just getting your casual music fan to put that into their headphones is already an uphill battle. Jonathan Snipes is a soundtrack guy with a history of laptop-centered rock-adjacent shows, which is an easier sell for some, but the blend of the three dudes generates a mutant strain—the ghosts of Halloween future—that would feel more at home in a dystopian film than on stage in Kansas City.
That’s why it is imperative that you come join us on Saturday night at Warehouse on Broadway. It is often easy to recommend local shows from acts that we know will be good. It is rare that we can endorse your attendance at a show that is so singular in style; this is really your only opportunity.
A decade in, the group has grown from the kind of audio secret that maybe your most eclectic friend knows of into a true juggernaut across the cultural spectrum. Their songs oscillate between club bangers and cold, visceral visions of cinematic abrasion. To say that what they make is closer to a screenplay or novel, well… their 2017 album Splendor & Misery was nominated for a Hugo Award for literary science fiction. That’s not the place where you’d normally find a cast member from Hamilton alongside digital basslines designed to destroy your skeleton.
Touring in support of their latest album, Dead Channel Sky, the three piece is also riding a wave of newfound fandom after one of the most innovative Tiny Desk Concerts we’ve ever seen. There are robots and Kid Koala. Actually, stop reading and just watch it right now.
Keep in mind, these are the songs re-imagined for that NPR show, and in person you’ll be treated to the full sonic wall of pain Diggs normally surfs. This is decidedly an ‘earplugs in’ kind of ride.
clipping. is coming to Warehouse on Broadway with opening act (and fellow Pitch fav) Open Mike Eagle and Cooling Prongs on Saturday night. Tickets are available here. Ahead of that gig, we sat down with the band’s Bill Hutson to talk about finding fandoms, building originality in a time of low experimentation, and whether or not the unrelenting, unforgiving speed of their nightmare rap show is designed to destroy Daveed Diggs.
Interview edited for content and clarity.
The Pitch: Ahead of this interview, I pulled the vinyl for one of the first records in my collection: your soundtrack to the documentary Room 237, about the film The Shining. I worry I’d never put it together that this was the same guy from clipping. What was that gig like? To be assigned the homework of, “We need you to do a soundtrack to a movie about The Shining that harkens to one of the most famous horror scores of all time, but we can’t use it.”
Bill Hutson: That project, which I made with Jonathan, was for a film that we thought was coming out on YouTube. It was made mostly from footage that was ‘borrowed’ from other sources, so we thought we were helping a friend with a little passion project, because no one would let him release this. Then Warner Brothers agreed to let him use the footage, and the film got theatrical distribution, and it became this much bigger thing. Suddenly much bigger than anything that anyone expected. The two of us, working the score, knew we weren’t going to duplicate Wendy Carlos or Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti—that would be punching way above our weightclass and we didn’t have a full orchestra to utilize. I think that the temp track the doc was being cut to involved music from Goblin, so we went for a sound closer to that; a little funky and synthy with an edge. We could make silly disco, easy.
It was around this time that we had a 5 song demo for music that would become clipping. and we had started playing it for people and… it was not finding a lot of passionate supprt. Folks weren’t exactly enthusiastic about our new band, so we traded making the Room 237 soundtrack for the director to make us a music video, to help give clipping. some starting moment.
You brought up that early on, it was a hard pitch to get people into the band. What was the process of making/finding a fan of clipping.?
We all came from different music projects, with work and relationships we’d put years and yeaars into. People understood our individual work and were really supportive, but then you start making sounds that don’t remain vaulted in a single vertical scene. Daveed was in a full band rap group, that had some jazz elements behind him. Jonathan had a weird laptop pop-punk thing, and I was doing ambient/harsh noise… a genre that doesn’t have mainstream, easy hooks but its easy to love among fellow creators and fans in that space.
clipping. combined all these things in a way no one else was doing. So. Playing it even for our own communities, playing it for other rappers or noise artists or rappers or electronic artists in the beat-making scene… we got a lot of: “Huh. Yeah. Yeah, uh, cool.” It was disorienting because it was so unenthusiastic. Except for a small handful of people who got it immediately and loved it.
So if there’s one or two people in a bunch of different places, but they all feel passionately about this, then that starts to add up into a small fanbase—isolated people all over the world. But that fanbase grew because suddenly you didn’t need to be from any of our three individual worlds. You didn’t have to come to this just being a fan of Daveed’s rap project, or my harsh noise work. There are certainly pockets of people for that but when it comes to clipping., for a long time, we were one of the only places you could hear something like clipping.
Isolated weirdos gave us forward momentum. That’s how you get clipping.
We uploaded the album to Bandcamp, and I don’t know at the time how many people were just sitting around listening to random, new stuff on Bandcamp, because our first album went up at 11 p.m. and by the next morning we had a ridiculous number of albums sold and an email from a guy who wanted to manage us—so, what the hell just happened? That was a big shift after all of our friends had been so ‘lukewarm’ on the band. This was not what we’d been picturing.
I just saw that you’re bringing Open Mike Eagle out on tour as your opener. That’s very exciting to us here at The Pitch. We’re longtime fans of his work, and we were just spinning his collaborative concept album with Cavanaugh last week.
Yeah, we’ve got Mike, who has been a friend and collaborator since the beginning. Technically, our first show ever was with him, We’ve third act with some of our closest collaborators, Christopher Fleeger, called Cooling Prongs. That’s his project with our new touring member Sharon Udoh, who plays keys and sings with us during our set now. Prongs is this queer music concrete pop jazz… I think people will love them.
This isn’t really the interview to ask about anyone’s genre of music, as if there are clear definitions or anyone else working in those spaces.
Back in 2013, we did feel completely alone in our space. We weren’t doing something 1000% new and we had influences, but many of those musicians were no longer active. So there weren’t specific crowds or venues set up to be receptive to this lane or genre. There is, however, a spirit of punk creative weirdness, and we could find those—both in America and abroad.
Would love to hear more about the addition of Sharon Udoh to the band.
She sings and is a virtuoso musician, who we’ve recorded a few songs with. People probably know her most from the NPR Tiny Desk Concert. It has made touring even more fun for us than it was before. One of the reasons we formed the band came from conversations between the three of us who had been doing music in different spaces for ten years, and we knew we all got along really well, and the idea of touring so we could have fun together… that came before the idea of the three of us making music. With that being so important, it meant we’ve always curated our touring experience closely. We don’t stay in hotels, we go for an Airbnb where we can hang out after shows, play cards, watch YouTube videos, and chill. That vibe is important, so Sharon fitting in there was key to the chemistry, and they’re probably about the most fun person to be around that I’ve ever met. That made things easy.
Regarding your incredible Tiny Desk Concert, that’s when I feel like a lot of our friends who, let’s say, didn’t get the group before really got the group. Did it feel like a breakthrough on your side? What kind of preparation went into performing such radically reimagined versions of those tracks?
Not enough. Not nearly enough work. It worked out, but…
We rehearsed for three days, before going out for two weeks on a normal tour. We built these little robots and found the objects they would hit, and programmed the songs, and only had time to run through a couple rounds. Then we packed all that shit and shipped it to D.C., then did the tour, and completely forgot everything we’d done to prep. We got to the NPR offices and opened the boxes and thought, “Holy crap, what did we get ourselves into?”
We had Sharon and Eric and Kid Koala, and then some robots. We’re lucky that no one broke.
It seems to be a very on-brand clipping. problem for a sci-fi band: “Oh no, our robots broke.”
Since the earliest days of Tiny Desk, Jonathan and I would watch musicians go on there and we were irked because the whole thing should be about the desk. It is called “Tiny Desk Concert” and I want more desk in there. So in our heads, we knew if we ever got the opportunity, we would make the most of the junk on the desk.
The people at NPR in the studio stayed so many extra hours to help us set up and tear down and record that show. It was not a normal workday for them. They could’ve just done a 9 to 5—it’s a government job—they didn’t have to give us so much of their time. They stayed until after midnight to help us figure out how to run it and film it. Not a word of complaint.
It is, unfortunately, retro to think of NPR as a government job.
That happened fast.
What are you excited to try on this leg of touring? Any new songs or arrangements or aesthetics? What are you taking a chance on?
Having Sharon in the band allows a lot of freedom. We’re playing a lot of the new stuff. One element of our live shows has always been that there are no breaks between the songs, because it is mixed like a DJ set. It’s a breathless, um, ordeal for Daveed. The latest album has more rave-inspired tracks, with a lot more overt dance music that creates a bigger party atmosphere. But it is funny to write high-energy, communal dance, ecstatic dance tracks, where the lyrics are about outer space and murder. But we love the juxtaposition of that. The music itself is designed ot be dense and interesting in headphones when you’re alone in your room, so to reinvent that to make it equally powerful when you’re crammed in together with strangers and hearing it happen live, it works on that level too. The show just gets more intense. It gets bigger and harder and faster.
The shows keep getting faster, there are no breaks between tracks—I have to ask, is this part of a plan to just keep making it harder on Daveed Diggs? Is clipping. actually a plot to murder Daveed Diggs?
We just keep testing him, yeah. Just push him to see how fast he can go, how few breaths he can take, how long he can go. We haven’t quite found the limit! Yet. We’re running experiments on him. At least with Sharon on stage, singing, he gets to breathe a little bit more.
clipping. is coming to Warehouse on Broadway with opening act (and fellow Pitch fav) Open Mike Eagle and Cooling Prongs on Saturday night. Tickets are available here.
