In 2020, the American trio clipping. released Visions of Bodies Being Burned. It’s a direct sequel to their previous album, There Existed An Addiction to Blood. More than just a sequel, this project is to be interpreted as the second half of the album which was begun in 2019. clipping. simply made too many tracks to fit into one continuous set of songs.

Apart from this, Visions of Bodies Being Burned also presents some differences from the previous album: an attitude towards the beat-making that is prog rather than industrial and less pop-oriented songs.

This album goes beyond the cinema-driven horror atmosphere of the first part. Science-fiction literature, mythology, folklore, and the music itself are the cultural fields that clipping. reinterpret and actualize as “rap songs in disguise.”

A new journey through demons and burned bodies

As such, the record proposes a noisy musical adventure again through the dark and haunted territories inhabited by blood, vexation, nightmares, demons, and brutal violence. The experience matured with the last record, though, making this half of this hip-hop journey more tied up together.

clipping. improved the production with consistent experimentation with samples and ambiental sounds. No more bloated interludes slow the narration down. Still, only the sense of the inevitability of danger and death becoming more present and steadier as the minutes pass.

A pulp mixtape to (re)narrate the collective imagination

As in There Existed An Addiction to Blood, the trio stuffed the record with quotations from horror movies and cultural products.

This time, though, the musical world is much more present. The group took the title from a line of the 1991 song Mind Playing Tricks On Me by Geto Boys. The hip-hop group from Houston revolved this track around the mental illness theme:

Candlesticks in the dark
Visions of bodies being burned

It’s clear how in this project, clipping. generate their horror narrative universe through a pulp mixtape that blends languages of different media together. Thus creating an expressive substance that is not merely musical nor literary or cinematic.

From Sci-Fi to neo-folklore: horrors of our time

From the 90’s horror’s collective imagination inspired narrative of Say the Name, but politically actualized through an antipatriarchal and antiracist reinterpretation of those themes; to Something Underneath, inspired by the N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth science-fantasy trilogy, centered on the life of the inhabitants of this supercontinent constantly on the verge of a geological disaster. While She Bad sees clipping. confronting the theme of unconventional female empowerment, retraced back to the movie Blair Witch Project, with references to folklore and creatures that reside in the deep of the forest. This record contains multitudes of fear.

A cross-media interpretation of horror

These are only some examples of the stories that compose the backbone of the record’s greater story: a narrative approach to horror. Transcending the horror genre’s rhetorical and stylistic boundaries to focus on more contemporary political and social problems: sexism and social construction of gender roles, racism and violence against minority groups and identities, cultural crisis, and atomization of society.