Clipping
Dead Channel Sky
Sub Pop CD/DL/2xLP

Black Rain
Neuromancer
Room40 DL/LP

Some context: William Gibson’s Neuromancer first came out in 1984, the same year that the hit movies Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo introduced Los Angeles rapper Ice-T as an electro MC tricked out in black leather, studs, zips and straps, plus a selection of stylised hats, the memory of which must still keep him awake at night. This was also the year when, according to the credits, Ice-T dropped some beats for Missing In Action, the first in a series of Chuck Norris movies that tried to persuade the American public that not only should the US have won the Vietnam War but also it kinda, sorta did. So that’s a mixed bag of fortunes right there. The point is that some works successfully create their own context, while others simply do not. Which is also why the 40th anniversary of Neuromancer gets a shout out, while Electric Boogaloo’s does not. Back then, dystopias were rarely mentioned in polite society, whereas today they generate seemingly endless posts on social media; and Ice-T plays a New York police detective on television.

Black Rain’s Neuromancer, a recent reworking of post-industrial soundscapes created for the 1994 audiobook version of Gibson’s novel, read by the author himself, and Clipping’s Dead Sky Channel, whose title echoes its famous opening line, are steeped in a sense of dystopian dread. But that was always there in Gibson’s original vision. Take another look at Neuromancer’s first sentence. Once startlingly alienating and fresh, it’s become so familiar that the mind barely takes it in. The sky above the port may well be “the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” – but what exactly is the colour of television, and what is a dead channel? Gibson confronts his readers with a mood, not a clear image. No wonder his fiction lends itself so well to music.

Black Rain offer a more literal interpretation of the book with tracks explicitly referencing the AI entity Wintermute and the “three notes high and pure” that unlock the novel’s ending. Blurred together into a sludgy industrial soundscape bubbling with biotech effluvia, each composition is alive with voices muffled by heavy metallic reverb, deep bass stabs, heavy, unnuanced percussive blows and occasional extended flurries of tightly sequenced drum patterns that sound like gunshots in the distance. Electronics run this world; anything even remotely natural exists solely as runoff, sluicing darkly from overflow pipes down drains and through gutters. It’s a sound that seems to haunt the entire album.

Originally recorded three decades back, Black Rain’s Neuromancer is cut from whole cloth and stretched tight. By comparison, Clipping’s latest release feels like scraps and tatters deftly woven together. Dead Sky Channel doesn’t keep still for a minute. Data streams are whipped into blizzards of words, beats, cuts and collisions. This is TikTok as a slasher movie. Blink and you are it. But for all its immediacy, the overall effect is one of a muted and grim nostalgia. Rapper Daveed Diggs makes lyrical use of standard cyberpunk images on “Mirror Shades” and “Polaroids”; while “Mood Organ” seems to reference the electronic device used in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to regulate human emotion: something left out of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, making the erasure of the boundaries between people and machines a little too one-sided. The individuals Daveed Diggs describes, for all their predatory indifference, remain all too human – or rather they still trade in human strengths, needs and weaknesses.

Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes provide soundtracks to match, drawing on acid beats and techno samples, freeform digital psychedelia and raw noise to flesh out these stories. The problem with this cut-and-paste variegation of the timeline is that the timeline itself eventually disappears into a network of associations, links and points of recognition. Like the mood Gibson establishes at the start of Neuromancer, it doesn’t go anywhere. Science fiction always ends up giving a more accurate picture of the social and political context in which it was created than of the future it seeks to imagine. Cyberpunk today is a tech billionaire wearing a Dark MAGA hat and wielding a chainsaw. Retreating to the comfort of a used future, even a dystopian one, no longer seems like the most realistic option.

This review appears in The Wire 494 along with many other reviews of new and recent releases. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.