Los Angeles trio clipping. are a collaboration between rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. Snipes is a sound designer, film composer, and experimental musician who records glitchy, snarky pop-deconstructionist noise music under the name Captain Ahab; he and Hutson are in the noise band Unnecessary Surgery, and co-created the score for the recent documentary Room 237. Initially, clipping. made power electronics-influenced remixes of rap songs, a formula that they stuck fairly close to when they recorded their 2013 debut Midcity after recruiting Diggs to provide original vocals.
Their second album, clppng, opens with a solid minute of the kind of dissonant, legitimately painful high-pitched feedback that sadistic noise guitarists favor, along with some vigorous cypher-style spitting. It’s a clear provocation and a quick primer on the group’s aesthetic aim, which is to deconstruct rap music while staying within the genre's confines—and it’s also a summation of the group’s two major flaws, which are that the tracks go just a little too far in their eagerness to challenge their audience and the raps they’re sharing space with are too banal to make the challenge worth it.
Snipes and Hutson are good at coming up with uniquely weird, aggressive sounds. In interviews, they’ve stressed that they begin with a clear idea of how their songs will sound and feel, and that meticulousness is evident on CLPPNG, like on the interplay between a suffocatingly dense bass synth and roomy, bell-like metallic samples on “Work Work”. The duo frequently embrace oddball samples that sound like they were pulled from field recordings; a judiciously edited instrumental version of CLPPNG could make for an interesting contemporary take on musique concrete.
When it comes to turning those sounds into proper rap songs, clipping. falter. There are a few moments where their approach pays off, offering an appealingly mutated version of the more commercial-leaning rap they used as source material in their earlier efforts. “Work Work” resembles a shroomy hallucination of a DJ Mustard beat complete with a verse by Cocc Pistol Cree, who coincidentally appeared on Mustard’s mixtape manifesto from last year, Ketchup. “Tonight,” featuring Gangsta Boo, pairs a two-note synth part that could have been pulled from an Atlanta rap mixtape with a fascinatingly bizarre electronic gurgle that sounds like a synthesizer’s death rattle.
More often, though, clipping.'s deconstructionist impulses run wild, as the group ignores some of the more crucial elements a rap beat needs. Most of these songs have tediously static arrangements, including “Get Up”, which uses an alarm clock beep as a rhythmic synth lead but fails to build on the conceit; the result sounds like an alarm clock going off for three whole minutes, which isn’t something most people want to hear. Many tracks don’t have proper drum parts, which speaks to the group's tendency to prioritize experimentation over cohesiveness.
It's possible that a capable MC might have balanced CLPPNG's deficiencies, but Diggs is far from capable. His backpacker-y flow sounds shopworn compared to the radically out-there beats, and his lyricism is lacking overall; hip-hop may be a massively self-referential genre, but the fact that nearly every track has at least one reference to an older Top 40 rap song seems like a grab for borrowed interest. Considering clipping.'s left-of-center style, he’s not particularly weird, and the persona that he projects—smart and misanthropic—is muddled at best. Overall, CLPPNG is chock full of ideas, and if its failure is due to overambitiousness, well, there are worse ways to fail.
