What I love most about cyberpunk is how polymorphic it is. Sure, everyone loves The Matrix or Blade Runner, which – thanks to large enough budgets – are incredible visual feasts of rich world building. But there’s an entire catalogue of B-movies, independent works, arthouse experiments or genre “trash” that was dismissed initially but with the passing of time looks all the cooler. That’s how you get stuff like the marvel that is Cyborg 2, starring a teenage Angelina Jolie, or Abel Ferrara’s intoxicating New Rose Hotel, with the all star cast of Willem Dafoe, Chris Walken and Asia Argento, all under the same umbrella. And then once you expand this into other medium, you find oddities like the video game Beneath a Steal Sky, Billy Corgan’s unfinished GATMOG-ARG or the legendary anime Serial Experiments Lain.
One reason for that is the malleability of the genre into a dark mirror of the present. Cyberpunk, at its origin point, came from a blend of philosophy with counter-culture and the popular arts of the post-war era. It’s equally vulgar and dazzling, as it combines the awe and political idealism of Metropolis with the twilight cynicism of film noir and opium-fuelled paranoia. It’s anti capitalist and anti-imperialist, stories of broken people who exist within sleepless eternal nights, if they’re not jacked into geometric systems of corporate social Darwinism. You can form and reform their cubes and pods, dye their hair and bend their gender – every perversion is permitted in the eternal anarchist interzone.
In music, this allows for a breeding ground for experimentation, which opens itself up to all kinds of aesthetic storytelling. There’s still no valid canon of cyberpunk records, but just look at this short overview and note how varied and contrasting these works are, such as: David Bowie’s 1.Outside, Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Skinny Puppy’s VIVISectVI, Burial’s Antidawn – and this is just an overview of the more apparent works; dive into the electronic sprawl of the 90s and between Underworld, Front 242, Future Sounds of London and Aphex Twin, you find fully elaborate visions of what music the protagonists of those worlds could listen to. This divides cyberpunk albums into two categories – albums as stories set within cyberpunk worlds, and music functioning as soundtrack.
Dead Channel Sky is, fittingly, situated between these two poles. Following a duo of horror-themed albums – the incredible There Existed an Addiction to Blood and the underwhelming Visions of Bodies Being Burned – it marks the return of clipping. after a near five-year absence. It’s rich in meta-text, cross references to black liberation and genre literature, there’s even a hidden reference to Information Society’s obscure 1990 album Hack, via “Mirrorshades pt. 2”, which in turn connects to William Gibson’s introduction of the word in Neuromancer and Bruce Sterling. There’s a Nels Cline piece here that simulates digital fragmentation and glitches and lots and lots of white noise. A complex and daring album, it provides a myriad of windows into a future world that resembles Trump’s current America. Yes, I like it much more than the somewhat prosaic cubism of Visions of Bodies Being Burned.
Contrasting the act’s incredible 2016 record Splendor & Misery, the album has no consistent narrative, seemingly depicting individual situations and characters in short bursts. Similar to There Existend an Addiction to Blood, this allows for an even flow of atmospheres into each other. This works especially well when clipping. breach genre boundaries to suggest a cavernous experience, such as on the somnambulist early 90s rap of “Keep Pushing”, the analytical endzeit-paranoia of the ambient-house standout “Ask What Happened” or the nervous DnB stutters of “Dodger”. In those moments, the dealers and shooters and hackers of the album transform into visions of black survival instincts that adapt to future infrastructures.
This connects with how clipping. imagined space travel as diaspora in their past work. Blackness is, ultimately, a marginalised existence in white America, only allowed within the costume of perceived performance of whiteness. It pushes the individual into the deep recesses of the dark internet. That’s a fantastic idea. But clipping. forget about the value of body horror – and sex – that makes cyberpunk so attractive.
That’s why the album at times loses itself in metaphors. “Polaroids” has a splendid narrative of a business deal gone wrong and an infrastructure as well as jungle merging into a dystopian cityscape, all through descriptions of discarded polaroids, themselves remnants of a past world. But the minimalist industrial backdrop offers little but digital artefact. “Madcap” is equally obtuse, barely warranting an inclusion outside of its colourful editing ideas, as it only stutters through stock bro imagery. “Dominator” suggests “consciousness is a memory stick”, but feels oddly sanitised, like a late-era Prodigy track. It’s all a little dry and repressed.
The only moment where things get sexy is the disco-infused “Mirrorshades pt. 2”, on which Cartel Madras’ Contra and Eboshi embody a cross of Aphrodite and Molly Millions. It’s a small hint at the hedonistic promise of cyberpunk nihilism, where body parts and pleasure can be artificially enhanced and orgasms implanted. When clipping. concentrate on the digital realm, they mostly succeed with the machismo of body enhancement. “Change the Channel” has fun with the idea of a strung up hacker who does breast milk and asbestos to keep tweaking. The post-70s synth-led “Welcome Home Warrior” flirts with the idea of neo-gladiator tribalism in videogame-like environments: “There’s a roll call wall it’s a vibe / Built out of images of interlocking crystals / Issued one for everyone who arrives / Don’t mean to spoil any kind of surprise / But guess what, brother, you’re next”. But these are ultimately warnings of removal and isolation. “Ask What Happened” and “Welcome Home Warrior” do suggest a form of transcendence in those moments, a reprieve from the cycle of drug trade and guns-for-hire, suggesting a melancholic hope in the breakdowns, while “Change the Channel” imagines an existence of constantly locked in log-in.
But then tracks like “Scams”, “Run It” or “Code” remain frozen in their existence of mid-90s rap skeletons. The beats, which could pop up on the soundtrack of the brilliant Hackers, are fine, and the production is air tight, but they also exist in a world of nerds and coders. On one hand, this corresponds with the intention of depicting a failing economy, which pushes black people into undesirable, criminal situations. But then it’s also a little bland. Cyberpunk is keen to portray its protagonists as glorified prostitutes, fall guys, disposables. In Neuromancer, after saving the life of protagonist Case and establishing herself as his security guard, Molly Millions fucks the guy in his tiny living pod; it’s neither fully transactional nor deeply emotional – it exists as a logical resolution to the infernal tension of a world where identity and personal experience are wholly interchangeable: a last human remnant.
Ironically, the hood films of the 90s approach sex similarly. Mistaken by white critics as stereotype of horny black machismo, these sex scenes reflect a direct expression of possible reprieve. If any day could be your last and sudden coincidence is the thin membrane between a living and a dead body, then transgressing the violence for compassion, even if just brief, becomes the only moment of transcendence from failing infrastructures and decay. Thus, clipping. work through the seemingly eternal contradiction of the American blackness being inherently criminalised, but they don’t break through the surface to find the full breadth of cyberpunk’s libidinal suggestions – the possibility for cyber-sex, bodies melting into liquid consciousness through drugs, touch as expression, the body as keyboard and pupils as screen. They could have easily found this parallel, but chose to only briefly graze the topic, in one song. They could have even found inspiration in a contemporary parallel: Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition, which is a more colourful outing filled with similar imagery.
A lot of Dead Channel Sky is legitimately banging, rousing electronic music, aided by clever production and creative editing – but it seems almost dated in contrast to the cyberpunk underground, such as the VILL4IN label, or the alleyways of vaporwave. It never quite reaches the potential of a fully-formed imaginary future world, as Future Sounds of London managed so effortlessly decades ago. It’s a cool and exciting album, but it doesn’t dream of electric sheep.
