Clipping. + Cooling Prongs (Christopher Fleeger x Counterfeit Madison)
Schedule
Sun, 21 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm
UTC+01:00Location
KOKO London | London, EN
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Baba Yaga's Hut Presents: 21st September - Koko
Clipping. + Counterfeit Madison
Tickets £29 (incl. fees) / 7:30
Returning to London for their biggest headline show yet at Koko!
Tickets are all gone through Dice now, last remaining tickets through Koko's website here:
https://www.koko.co.uk/events/clipping
Clipping (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes) are very story-oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. Across six albums, along with countless singles, remixes, and collaborations, Clipping has been approaching making music like writing science fiction since the band’s conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards (one of science fiction’s top literary prizes), and a novella spun-off from their music was nominated for a third. As Clipping, they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists as they have fellow rappers.
While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, new album Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.
On Dead Channel Sky, Clipping texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle, are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.
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Cooling Prongs is the performance and studio project of field recording artist Christopher Fleeger, disporting a song-oriented musique concrète approach often built entirely from voice, sampled objects, and field ambience recordings. With the precision of a true audio and programming professional—and the chaos of someone perpetually debugging and simultaneously expanding their own tools—Cooling Prongs runs on hacked mallet controller hardware and custom software patches that are almost finished, almost working, and always locked to a rhythm system that breathes, stutters, and occasionally falls apart…and then apologizes for making things awkward when they really weren’t something anyone else noticed.
With the arrival of pianist, improviser, and vocalist Sharon Udoh—the explosive genre expansive force behind Counterfeit Madison who has been described as a warm bowl of soup, a tornado, a jalapeño pepper, a Jackson Pollock painting, a bulldozer, kind, dangerous, and magnetic—Cooling Prongs expands into new visceral terrain as a duo.
Cooling Prongs' music is available via Deathbomb Arc, with additional collaborations alongside clipping. on Sub Pop.
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Where is it happening?
KOKO London, 1a Camden High Street, London, NW1 7, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
