Great gig to finish the year with – clipping. at Corsica Studios.
After a very moody door exchange where I was asked first for photo ID and then if I either worked for the police or the council (!?) we got inside an absolutely rammed room.
Clipping deliver a shot blast to the inside of your skull, sometimes it’s sheer noise and you can’t make out the beats or tempo and then it suddenly locks in and you find the whole room head-nodding in unison. Daveed Diggs‘ incredible delivery propels each song using multiple time signatures, single, double and even triple time raps, dancing all over the rhythms eked out of little more than beats, bass and static. At times it seems that the roof is about to come off but there’s so little actual sound in the track that it feels more like floating in space. You want to mosh but there’s a 130 bpm tune actually only bouncing at 65 but with builds that sound like the nastiest German techno but no 4/4 kick drum to pin it down.

What was great was hearing kids 25 years younger than me rapping along word perfect, every line, every nuance, every shift in rhythm, just as I and my mates had done at Beasties, Cypress Hill or Public Enemy gigs a quarter of a century ago. This is their equivalent. They knew the old stuff best and when the group finished with the avant garde space opera of ‘Splendor & Misery’ and dropped into tracks from ‘Midcity’ and ‘CLPPNG’ they got the response they wanted.

‘Wriggle’ burst into its 303 acid second half and then got pushed up into an AFX Amen-punishing d’n’b version and ‘Body & Blood’ is still the most terrifying sex with power tools track ever.
With monochrome static and bit-crushed graphics projected across the band in the tiny run down black box of a room this was absolutely the best place to see them. So refreshing, so exciting, so far out I’m not sure it even qualifies as hip hop.