Interview: Bill Hutson (clipping.)

Real heads know: years before Hamilton and the Tony Awards, stage and screen actor Daveed Diggs was making conceptual hip-hop, spitting rapid-fire lyrics over mesmerizing beats by Bill Hutson and Jonathan Snipes in clipping. Following near annual output of LPs, EPs, and mixtapes, the group released Dead Channel Sky, its most impressive album to date, on March 14, and will play its second Eulogy show in 14 months this August.

As a tune-up for that tour, clipping. travels east for a Saturday, March 29, performance at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, closing out Jackson Terminal’s day-long schedule. Prior to the trip, Hutson spoke with Asheville Stages from his Napa Valley home about cyberpunk, continually being in awe of Diggs’ rapping, and helping make beer with one of Asheville’s finest breweries.

Edwin Arnaudin: So,  Asheville seems like y'all's new favorite place, to an extent. 

Bill Hutson: Yeah! We played at the Moog factory once. We did a little video for them many years ago when we were on tour with a band called Youth Code. We had a day free and we stopped and did a a track there. So, 2016 — maybe 2015. And yeah, we just loved it. There was a crazy rainstorm when we were there, so it was just pouring rain. But we did our thing at the Moog factory and then we had a day off, so we all went and saw a movie together — The Equalizer with Denzel Washington. 

And just being in the little downtown area — there are these little cool pockets everywhere throughout the U.S. where it's like a little college town. And I remember walking around and the next morning we went and got really good coffee somewhere. We're like, “Holy shit! It's a great place.” Unless you've been there, you don't know. I didn't know much about the Carolinas in general. Before you tour, you don't know that there are these cool places in every state. Every state has a couple of cool places with, like, bookstores and coffee shops and a cool bar — and so much good food.

EA: Yeah. It's like these culture oasis spots. We're definitely spoiled here. And speaking of spoiled, you've experienced some of the other great stuff that we have here with Eulogy, getting to play there last year.

BH: Love that place.

EA: And how did the partnership with Burial [Beer Co.] arise for these not one, but two beers? 

BH: Sort of three. I don't know — one of them didn't get finished. We did a tasting of a possible future beer that didn't get made yet. But they invited us to play the fest, their [Anno XI 11th Anniversary] show. [Co-founder] Doug [Reiser] hit us up and said, “We often do a special beer for some of the bands that are playing the fest. What kind of beer do you like? What do you want?” And we all three were like, “Hey, can we actually have a meeting and get on Zoom and chat about beer? Because we actually really like beer and we've always dreamed of doing a collab with a brewery.” We would've never thought a brewery we adore so much as Burial would be interested in us.

I remember Doug saying, “Most of the metal bands we do beers for, they just tell us they drink Natural Ice or PBR and that we need to somehow make them a beer that tastes like that, because that's all they drink.” But we were like, “No, no, no. We've got all these ideas. We're huge beer nerds.” So, I think — I mean, I hope that it was sort of fun working with us because we cared a lot about it and we were really excited about it. 

When we left for that weekend, Doug said, “Why don't we do another beer when the album comes out?” We had a handful of ideas that we would bounce back and forth. But at least for me and Jonathan, the beers we care the most about — that's why we pushed for the cleanest, most elegant, subtle West Coast IPA imaginable. We were just like, “What is the most classic West Coast IPA? We want it clear as hell. No haze.” I loved the first one [For Something Underneath] we did during the fest, but the new one [Under The Dead Channel Sky] is even closer to my taste. I mean, it's just flawless. It's so perfectly made. And it was exciting. 

We did a little tasting for a possible aged sour collab as well. And it was pretty exciting because the head of their barreling program was a brewer at Rare Barrel in Berkeley — which is a very cult brewery in Berkeley that got sold and became Cellarmaker [Brewing Co.] — and she left to join Burial’s program. She was the one in charge of making that beer, which hasn't actually come out yet. I don't really know what the plan is, but it was really fun to meet her because she was from where I grew up. She's from where Daveed and I both grew up. Of Berkeley breweries, that's kind of the flagship — that's definitely the coolest brewery in Berkeley. Even now that they got sold and they're called something else, they still make good beer. But Rare Barrel was like — that was cult shit. 

EA: Nice! I didn't know y'all had that beer-loving background. I know they've worked with Run the Jewels and some others, but I don't think it's been that involved with them. It's just sort of like, “Yeah, you guys just do what you want. We'll drink it no matter what.”

BH: They said one that was fun before was a smoked coffee beer, because someone was like, “I don't drink beer. I just smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, so make something that tastes like cigarettes and coffee.” It was some metal artist. I can't actually remember who.

EA: And y'all are heading back east for Big Ears this weekend. Have you been to that festival before? 

BH: No! They've asked us to play probably half a dozen times. We've never made it work. It's just one of the coolest lineups. I'm actually kind of disappointed that I'm not going to get to see more stuff. We're kind of flying in and out — I have a two-month-old kid and I'm not trying to be away from home. It feels frivolous to go an extra day or stay later to see all these artists that I want to see. 

But it's one of those things — there are a couple of them in the U.S., but those lineups at Big Ears look like a fest we would play in Europe. You look at it and you're like, “Everything on here is so cool!” I don't know how you get away with this with U.S. budgets. It's so much experimental music and so much, like, out jazz stuff. We've got friends playing that I'm not going to get to hang out with. Our friend Ambrose Akinmusire is playing the first night — just brilliant, brilliant trumpet player. 

But I love that scene, that community. You look at the lineups year to year and there's so many people who come back every year. So many players that get rearranged into new groups or bring new groups. I mean Ambrose, I think last year or the year before, he got to debut in a totally new group that I think they organized with Big Ears. That was Ambrose, William Parker, and Andrew Cyrille — like, free jazz fucking legends playing with a friend of ours, which just blew my mind. So, yeah, super excited for that fest, but really wish I could just hang out and be there the whole time.

Have you been?

EA: So, this will be my first time. Its just in the last year Knoxville got on my radar as something I should be paying more attention to because it’s only two hours away from Asheville. It took going to see Neil Young in Atlanta last year and then getting stuck in traffic on the way back, and a four hour trip turns into a six hour trip. And I'm like, “Where is a closer city that has this draw?” So I went to see Cat Power do her Bob Dylan thing at the Bijou Theater last year. And I'm like, “Knoxville's pretty cool.” Just seeing all the theaters that are going to be part of the fest — they’re so close to each other and very walkable.

I usually go to Hopscotch [Music Festival] in Raleigh every year, and it kind of reminds me of that. We've had a fest the last two years here, AVL Fest, that's kind of similar of just bouncing from one venue to another. So yeah, I'm really excited. I think it's going to be really good.

BH: That’s great. We played Hopscotch once early in our career. That was a fun fest, too. We really liked that one. 

Photo by Daniel Topete

EA: Excellent. Well, I want to say “thank you” for Dead Channel Sky. It’s one of my top three albums of the year right now with Panda Bear and Japanese Breakfast. So thanks for putting all the thought into it. 

BH: Oh, I gotta check out the Panda Bear. I saw him last year. He’s fucking brilliant. 

EA: You know, Avey Tare lives in Asheville…

BH: Oh cool! 

EA: Obviously, the album's very steeped in cyberpunk and, kind of going back in time, what were some of your first encounters with that genre?

BH: I remember I was pretty young and my mom gave me William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, which is the collection of short stories. It contains some Sprawl [Trilogy] stories in it, like “Johnny Mnemonic” and stuff. And I think she was sort of starting me out slow. I was reading tons and tons of sci-fi by then, and I remember her giving me that book and being like, “Look, there's a pretty graphic sex scene in one of these stories.”

EA: [laughs]

BH: “So, if that makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to read that one — I can tell you which. And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. I'm down.” But like, whatever it is — there's something you're worried about me reading, I'm gonna read that one first. We thankfully never discussed it after she gave me the book. It was just one and done. She was just making sure I was OK with it and I was.

But that was definitely the first. And then I read the rest of the Gibson novels, and some time in high school I read Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan — stuff like that. Neil Stephenson, of course. But it's not really my genre. It was something that I liked. Horror and other versions of sci-fi have always been more my taste. But I've read enough of it. 

We really sort of stumbled across this. Basically, this album started because we were invited to make a song for a video game, and we didn't send it early enough. But we liked the song. So we were either gonna release a loose single, or we started talking about, like, “What would be a whole album built around this project?” I think it had a lot to do with Jonathan having recently done the score for our friend Rodney Ascher's documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, which is about the idea of, “Do we live in a simulation?” And people who actually believe in simulation theory — that we're all living in a computer game or whatever. It was around the same time that we started working on this.

[Jonathan] had been watching all these ’90s internet panic movies, like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor and Existenz, and stuff like that. So, he'd been thinking a lot about these virtual worlds and we sort of landed on the idea of doing more rave-adjacent music — more overtly dance oriented than our usual thing. I mean, we always have a couple of dance-y tracks per album, but to really lean into our history as ravers and lovers of rave music. We wanted to do that and adapt those genres to rap music. So, that's sort of the history of that. 

EA: I was curious about — especially this album, specifically — y'all's creative process. Having three members — two producers, an MC — is this something where you individually work for a while and then come together? What was your workflow on this project?

BH: The way we make tracks is we have an idea for a track and then we discuss that for a really long time before we even start any audio. So, everything is pretty much started together — everything is agreed upon that it's gonna be this type of beat with these type of sounds with this story attached. Generally, that's how we work. Obviously, there are beats on this album that I started first. There's beats that Jonathan started first that we were like, “Oh, I think we could turn it into this thing.” But they were very skeletal and sketchy before we all come together and agree that this is what we're gonna do with this.

And then we make them together, largely. Jonathan does a lot of work on his own because he lives in the studio that we record in, so he can work all day. And he's also a brilliant musician, so he just works. But yeah, generally we don't really jam and we don't just start things without a plan.

EA: That makes sense. Has that pretty much been the same since y'all started or has it become more streamlined as technology and distance has come between y'all? 

BH: It’s actually much less streamlined because we're all far away and much busier. But no, the very first record [midcity] is pretty different because we were all in other projects. This was like a silly side project that we were just trying out to see if it would work, because the three of us were really close friends and we sort of tried to figure out, like, “What is the music that the three of us would make together?” 

And so those were definitely much less planned. They weren't so conceptually rigorous, either. That very first album, we really were just fucking around with sounds. Jonathan and I lived very close to each other. We were always in the studio anyway. And it would be just like making weird, harsh sounds that have a kind of an internal rhythm to it that we could write some rap to. They were less like, “It's gonna be this type of song about this.” And we were much less prescriptive about what the songs were about. 

We had this sort of central idea that they were these abstract rap songs without a character — without an “I” center. Sort of fractured rap clichés, almost. Like, grab all of the little bits and pieces that are repeated through rap songs, but take out the subjective center and just sort of have this — I think of it as almost a haiku sense of these little images or single instances. Just describe a moment without you in it, without an “I,” but you still can tell it's a rap song because it's got all the hallmarks — the stuff that is talked about in rap songs. So, those were a lot freer. 

But it turned out that this thing that we thought was just a fun project with our friends was actually the most successful thing we'd ever done. And at the time, it wasn’t, like, wildly successful. But it got us signed to Sub Pop. And so then, all of a sudden, we had an album to make. And that's where we started to do this thing where we would say, “We're gonna make this type of beat and the song is going to be about this lyrically.” And so that became the mode thereafter. 

EA: Obviously, working together for as long as you have, I would still think that there's a lot of room for surprising each other and making each other's jaws drop a bit. Were there moments lyrically from Daveed or sonically from Jonathan on the latest album that really did that for you?

BH: Yeah! I mean, always. Every time. The studio is downstairs and Jonathan and I would be working, but we would have a collection of beats that were sort of ready for something. And Daveed goes and sits upstairs with headphones on while we're working on a beat downstairs. And then we'll stop once he comes down and says, “Hey, I think I wrote something for this.”

I mean, every time, it always blows us away. It goes through many drafts, but there's always that first time, and I'm always shocked at how well the first time we hear a verse is. Daveed generally gets through the whole thing in one take the first time, so we hear it like everyone else does — the first time we hear our beat that we are very familiar with, but then we hear him rap over it straight through the first time. So, that is an exciting experience every time that he does that. 

Neither Jonathan nor I were there when Daveed recorded “Polaroids.” That was a beat — we didn't have any idea. It was just in our folder. We just have a Dropbox folder of beats for the record. And we hadn't even really discussed what we were gonna do with that one. That was our attempt to sound like Pan Sonic, the Finnish group that we love. And Daveed actually wrote that — didn't even mention it. And he went to the guy who — we generally rerecord all the vocals with our mixing artist, Steve Kaplan, and Daveed had to record some other stuff for the album, but we didn't even know he'd written to that one and he just had something.

So, he recorded that with Steve without me or Jonathan even in the room or being there. So we got that whole song finished. So we heard it for the first time in the exact form that it's on the album and it just showed up. And that's some of my favorite writing of Daveed’s. It's really that haiku imagistic — literally just describing snapshots. I mean, I think it comes from how often we talk about it like that, that he came up with this idea of these lost photographs in each verse — it’s just a description of the photograph from three points in time before the current apocalypse we're all living in right now.

Photo by Jonny Leather

EA: And kind of tying the album together are all these impressive collaborations — and to me, the two that really stand out are Nels Cline and Aesop Rock. Why did you feel like those two were the best fits for those tracks? 

BH: Well, the Nels thing was — that track [“Malleus”] is really a tribute to Derek Bailey, the guitar player who passed away, god, almost 20 years ago now [in December 2005]. But in the ’90s, he made these home recordings where he would just play his guitar along to pirate radio stations that played jungle [music]. He had discovered pirate radio stations that were playing all this old school jungle stuff that was outside of the parties and the sound system culture. 

Pirate radio was huge for jungle music, and he was just blown away by it. And he would record himself with a tape player, just playing guitar over the top of jungle music as if it was his improvisational partner. Because he didn't understand the structure of jungle, he didn't know where it was going. It was all this sort of excitement and newness and it felt like playing with another player. So he made these little recordings and two of them came out on a comp that David Toop organized.

And then, a couple years later [in 1996], John Zorn commissioned, like, actual jungle beats and made a duo album with Derek and this DJ [Ninj] — and, it's OK. It's good. It was never one of my favorite records of his. But just recently, these original tapes were released and they're really lo-fi they're very “home recording.” You know, it's just Derek in his kitchen or whatever. And these were really inspirational. Not only do you hear my favorite guitar player, [but he’s] playing over all these old classic, like, ’92, ’93 — early, early jungle tracks. So, I had this idea of doing a sort of tribute to that where our song sort of fades out into sounding like it's on the radio.

Then Nels — as far as I know, he and Derek were friends. Derek released a couple of Nels’ albums in the early days. Acoustic Guitar Trio was on his label, Incus. And one of the first times I met Nels, 25 years ago now, we talked about Derek and how much we both admired his music. And so I kind of knew that Nels would know what I was talking about. 

Nels was also— he's an LA guy. He's one of my favorite guitar players of all time. When I moved to LA from the Bay [Area], I started going to shows immediately. I was, you know, 18 and I was taking the bus from UCLA all the way to downtown LA — before downtown LA was sort of gentrified and revitalized, when past 7 p.m., there were only homeless people there — to go see free improv shows and to go see Nels. 

One of the very first shows I ever went to was to see his guitar player, Rod Poole, who was a good friend of Nels’ who has also passed away. I remember there were, like, 10 people in the audience, and I was this 18-year-old kid, and I recognized Nels and started talking to him. And he was super, super, super friendly. And so I would see him at shows for the next handful of years until he joined Wilco and moved out of LA. But I sort of thought maybe, at least he'd know who clipping. was — when I reached out and reminded him that I was just some dumb kid that he used to be really nice to many years earlier.

And because Wilco had invited us a couple years ago to play their [Solid Sound] fest at MASS MoCA, which is where members of the band pick what bands they want to see. And we got to headline the second biggest stage, right after Wilco played. And all the members of Wilco ran over to our stage and watched from the side of the stage — which was amazing to me and blew me away. They’re the absolute coolest people. 

And so I kind of knew that this email wouldn't totally come out of the blue for Nels. There were all these connections where I thought Nels would maybe remember me: he knew the band, I thought he might be excited to do this sort of “his style” tribute to these particular Derek Bailey recordings. So, that's sort of what that is.

I've now talked 20 times longer than the track length about that. [laughs]

EA: [laughs]

BH: But that's all what it was for me and why that was so important for me to do. And Nels was amazing. A couple days later, he sent tons of audio and was like, “Cut it however you want. Do whatever. I think it'd be really cool if you layer this part in this part.” And I was like, “Done. Yeah. Amazing.”

And then, I mean, Aesop Rock is just our favorite rapper. Outside of E-40 and Mac Dre and Lil Wayne, probably the rapper that Daveed and I have spent the most time listening to in our lives. Daveed was the rapper in high school when we were kids. And I really think hearing Float by Aesop Rock was pivotal for both of us. It came in an exact right time where we obsessed — we spent hours and hours and hours listening to that album, and discussing all of the imagery and how it connected to this song and this song. And we think it's about this. And we think that the central metaphor of everything is this. We were really obsessed. And then also Labor Days. He's always just been this really important figure for us. 

And I do think Aesop Rock's one of those rappers that doesn't have a lot of disciples out there. Just because how can you possibly? You know, it's not like other influential rappers where there are hundreds of great rappers who came later. But I do think Daveed is one of the — even if he doesn't really sound like him often, Daveed is probably one of the truest disciples of Aesop Rock out there.

And so, Daveed's hung out with him a handful of times. We've always said he was our favorite. And so we played a fest with him in Austin years ago. And he played right after us on a different stage. I remember we ran from our set to go watch him, and then he was staying at the same hotel as us. So when we got back to the hotel, he was in the lobby with Rob Sonic, and we walked in and he beckoned us over. We sat down, we had a few beers. We hung out for a couple hours just in the lobby and also saw the guys from METZ, who were also on Sub Pop — incredible noise rock band. Great, great guys. 

So we had this really fun evening and I remember, this was many years ago, we said, “We should do a song, right? We should do a song together.” And he was super nice about it. He was like, “Of course! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” But we were too nervous to ever hit him up. We were like, “We need to step up. If we really wanna send him something, we gotta be ready.” Because also, Daveed was like, “He's gonna murder me on my own song.”

EA: [laughs]

BH: “I just need to be OK with that, and I need it to not be, like, really, really obvious. It can be just kind of obvious.”

EA: I mean, that's my favorite track on the album. It's clear that you put that kind of thought into it, and it really comes through. It's my favorite beat. It's the most traditionally hip-hoppy — but still not traditionally hip-hoppy one on there. It's a jam for sure. 

BH: Well, and also, who else? There aren't a lot of rappers in the world — we have a lot of favorite rappers that I don't think we'll ever really be able to work with just because of the way we work. But Aesop Rock is someone that you can tell this incredibly abstract idea, or this — I guess it's more specific. We made an abstract song out of this very specific idea that future wars are fought like Ender’s Game, through computers, and that Daveed is a recruitment official and that you're the gamer, and that Ian [Bavitz, Aesop Rock’s real name] was the gamer accepting his position in the future military in these endless wars. Nobody understands what they're fighting for. So giving him that assignment, there's not a lot of rappers you can say, “Hey, that's what the song's gonna be about.” And for him to be just like, “Sick. All right. I'll send you something in a week.”

EA: Yeah, it's like him and maybe some of the other Rhymesayers guys could handle that too. I've spoken to Slug a few times. 

BH: Sure! Yeah. Well, it’s not even “handle.” it's just “want to,” you know? Some of my favorite rappers just wouldn't be interested. I think that’s the other issue. I don't even think it's a skill issue. I think it's just a temperament issue. 

EA: One last question. So you've done [albums inspired by] horror, cyberpunk — what kind of genre is calling to you next? 

BH: Oh, god. I don't know. I'm not gonna answer that. We have the next three albums — we have ideas. 

EA: OK. That's good enough.

BH: We’ll see what we actually do. 

IF YOU GO

Who: clipping.
When: Saturday, March 29, 10:45 p.m.
Where: Jackson Terminal, 213 W Jackson Ave, Knoxville, bigearsfestival.org
Tickets: Sold Out

(Photo by Daniel Topete)