clipping., Dead Channel Sky
Experimental hip-hop group clipping.'s cyberpunk themed album
Dead Channel Sky is the most recent album from experimental noise & hip-hop group, clipping. It released on March 14th and was their first album in 4.5 years, since their horror influenced album Visions of Bodies Being Burned (a follow-up to There Existed an Addiction to Blood.)
The cover was designed by The Designer's Republic, an influential British graphic design studio, best known for their work in electronic music logos and album artwork, with artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO, and The Orb.
The cover features a white insect (vine weevil? sorry, not an entomologist) made of distorted digital patterns. To the left, is a wordmark for clipping. in 3 lines, and below, the name of the album in English and Japanese, displayed horizontally.
The digital and distorted themes match the cyberpunk theme through the album and distorted nature of clipping.'s production. The album name itself is a reference to an influential piece of cyberpunk literature, William Gibson's Neuromancer.
I do find the color palette and overall composition less colorful and more minimal than some modern depictions of the cyberpunk theme. It does seem to point toward the more corporate side of cyberpunk, with a hyper-simplification of messages and design structure.
The wordmark is a futuristic simplification of glyphs in a stacked composition—I like the concept but the first 'p' can be read as an 'R' due to the tittle on 'i' below. In a similar manner to the above, the glyphs seem to lean more towards the 'cyber' side, rather than 'punk'. The Japanese text appears because it looks cool, but also because of Japan's relevance to the cyberpunk genre, with many works like Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel Alita influencing the genre, and the genres popularity in Japan.
Frankly, I don't know the connection with the insect... as with the lyrics, it could be a reference to cyberpunk literature or art which I'm not familiar with. A guess could be equating each human in a cyberpunk world with a bug—unimportant in the grand scheme. It could also reference a bug in a program or software, which of course is a large part of the cyberpunk world. Maybe a security vulnerability, a bug in a digital world enabling a hack or a bug in a physical world being able to access something that anything larger couldn't.
If it is a vine weevil, it's an invasive pest. This could represent the punks who are seen as pests to large corporations, or to a punk, the corporations who invade their space and make everything worse.
clipping. album covers historically lean abstract and simple, and this is no exception, though this cover feels a little more detailed. There is an additional vinyl edition available: Loser Edition with a pink insect on the cover and pink, green or silver record.
I have been a fan of clipping. since learning of their work, exploring their discography and not-so-patiently waiting for the release of Dead Channel Sky. I enjoy the music on the album, though it lacks some of the stronger noise elements that many clipping. fans love. My favorite track is Run It.
