If you’ve ever read any texts on alternative media written at the beginning of the ’90s, it can be a little disappointing realizing how much potential we’ve squandered. Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Media Virus! about how cable TV channels, zines, online communities, and other “memes” could spell out a utopian future at odds with the apocalyptic pessimism of the 20th century sci-fi canon—all of this immediately before the tech-anxiety cyberthriller (and, subsequently, disaster movies, natural or otherwise) became popular in Hollywood.
With their sixth album, clipping. graduate from the horrorcore raps of their last two projects to instead inhabit the cyberspace between dread and anticipation of a more democratic future, with Dead Channel Sky—if you squint hard enough, or not at all—ultimately being a celebration of the cultural moment that arose from this tension. Speaking to the record’s influences, the band’s William Hutson cites William Gibson (of course) and Hackers (obviously) as primary sources of inspiration, as well as the music that was briefly being marketed to us as The Next Big Thing in the mid-’90s when the latter film was released. “Soundtracks of that era, which mashed together all the branching genres of electronic music, shaped our concept for the album as a compilation CD of what we all imagined the future was supposed to sound like in 1995,” he explains.
And for some clarification on my “squint hard enough” comment, vocalist Daveed Diggs touches upon another pop culture artifact that relates to Dead Channel Sky’s subtle brilliance: Magic Eye posters. The 20 tracks on this album continue to focus just as much on Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’ meticulous sound design as they do on Diggs’ rapid lyricism, with these minimal beats landing somewhere between ambient electronic music and the stripped-back sounds of 2000s radio rap when not dipping into breakbeats and glitched-out noise. In other words, this is a record for the Kramers out there rather than for the Mr. Pitts.
With the LP out now via Sub Pop, stream it below and read Hutson’s explanations for the writings, visual art, and other non-musical influences on Dead Channel Sky, with a few items thrown in by both Snipes and Diggs. You can also purchase the record here.
“The Gernsback Continuum” by William Gibson
Look: the title of our new album comes from what is, perhaps, the most famous opening line in sci-fi literature, but it was just one of at least a dozen possible titles, and it wasn’t settled on until Ian [Anderson, from The Designers Republic] really needed some words to put on the jacket art he was working on. Even more than the Sprawl trilogy, which everybody knows, I was particularly captured by Gibson’s earlier short story “The Gernsback Continuum” where a man is haunted by visions of what the present was supposed to look like from the perspective of 1940s and ’50s “golden age” science fiction. Dead Channel Sky is kind of our update of that—“The Gibson Continuum”—a description of our present, seen through the lens of 1980s cyberpunk literature, and what parts of that imaginary [world] did or did not come true. We wanted to see those past works as a kind of ghostly overlay on top of our current dystopia. Gibson writes: “And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in.”
Hackers
So many movies of the 1990s promised us that the internet was going to be cool. Turns out, most of it is crushingly boring, and hackers are, in large part, not sexy at all. It’s not a great movie, but Hackers captures this moment when we could imagine a radical punk potential to all this connectedness, before we understood that tech would just accelerate the collapse of the American empire and immiserate every vulnerable group on the planet.
I know this is supposed to be non-musical influences, but, Hackers was also a product of the “electronica” boom of the late ’90s, where alternative radio in the US needed to figure out what came after grunge and began repackaging European rave culture as the next-big-thing. Soundtracks of that era, which mashed together all the branching genres of electronic music, shaped our concept for the album as a compilation CD of what we all imagined the future was supposed to sound like in 1995.
Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher
We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.
Future Ancestral Technologies by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Future Ancestral Technologies is an ongoing body of work by our friend, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. Using video, performance, sculpture, costume, etc., Cannupa imagines a post-colonial, post-capitalist future where the detritus of our present culture is recycled into the ceremonial regalia of an Indigenous-lead civilization that seeks to heal humanity’s bond with the Earth, other species, and itself. As with Roy’s description of hip-hop as an assemblage of cultural waste, Cannupa presents a vision of radical possibility in the collapse of the oppressive systems we currently live under. My several conversations with him about his work were on repeat in my head as we made this album. Dead Channel Sky is the present, teetering on a precipice, and Cannupa’s Indigenous Futurism is one possible (beautiful, hopeful, inspirational) outcome. I can’t wait until all the world’s worst people fuck off to go colonize Mars and leave everyone else to rebuild.
TDR’s design for WipEout, WipEout 2097, and Wip3out
Until Dead Channel Sky, we had designed all of our album art in-house. Because of the rave music influences on the album, it was hugely important to me that Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic do the art for this record, and we did our best to give him free reign (he might disagree). Although I had first encountered his work through various albums on Warp Records, learning that he had also designed one of my favorite video game series was a revelation. As an F1 fan who cares a lot about liveries, I love WipEout’s iconography almost as much as I do the soundtrack and gameplay—its precision and its visual density. I can’t even describe what an honor it is to have had Ian design this album. I kind of still can’t believe we got to work with him. Real life bucket list shit.
Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering by Andrew “bunnie” Huang
Jonathan contributed this pick, citing it as one of the most important works ever written about hardware hacking—about taking a closed, proprietary system, within which the user is only allowed to do a limited number of things, prescribed by a corporation—and breaking that system to discover what other possibilities are hidden within it. This book represents the actual radical potential of the hacker figure—a potential that feels further away today, as internet nerd culture becomes increasingly radicalized toward white supremacy and fascism.
Regarding hardware, it has always been important to us that we use our tools in ways that go against their designed intentions. Link Wray distorted the sound of his guitar by poking holes in the speaker cone of his amp. There was a danger in that, a destructive, no-turning-back-now impulse, but also the prospect of discovery. My and Jonathan’s histories in experimental music were driven by finding new, unintended sounds inside our materials. There’s something lost when brand-new boutique Eurorack modules can quickly simulate that danger without the fear of frying your power supply. (Although, we’re not, like, above using those kinds of things, of course.)
Magic Eye posters
OK, so I asked Daveed to add something to this list and he suggested Magic Eye posters. Aside from being a dumb, fun, computer-generated novelty from the 1990s, he told me that the way some of the storytelling is obscured in Dead Channel Sky reminds him of how images are hidden within the visual noise patterns of the posters. The listener needs to stop trying, and blur their focus on the surface-level artifice in order to glean any meaning buried in the chaos. But even if they don’t, there’s still this crazy trippy surface to stare at.
Parenthood
All three of us became fathers while working on this album, and in some ways, I think Dead Channel Sky is our most hopeful work yet. Not that it isn’t extremely pessimistic and critical of the world we live in—we still are who we’ve always been—but the album’s sonic world is that of the rave, which is often imagined as a form of fleeting utopia. The fact is, our live shows are parties. Sometimes people are surprised by that. Even though the lyrics to our songs are often extremely bleak (isolating sit-at-home-staring-at-your-speakers music), in the context of a show, the real-world material effect is ecstatic. By focusing this album on music that it expressly designed to be danced to in large groups, we’re pointing toward a kind of joy in the collective, and also toward the potential for radical change that that collective could possibly enable. I think of this impulse in relation to Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality as renewal, as the possibility of a new world being born with each baby, and the unexpectedness that engenders—but also our responsibility to make a world that each new person born into it could love.
