Tiny Desk Meets SXSW: clipping. Employ Teeny Tiny Instruments for Their NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) Concert [Sub Pop Records]
NPR Music regularly participates in the annual SXSW Music Festival, whether it's curating their own stage or, simply, attending and reporting on hundreds of shows in Austin, Texas. Last year, it was canceled due to The Pandemic, but SXSW returned this March as an online-only festival. NPR Music was asked to program a "stage" of Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts and present them on the final day of this year's festival. Now, we present to you, Tiny Desk Meets SXSW: four videos filmed in various locations, all of them full of surprises. Leave it to clipping. to innovate around the fundamental notion of a "Tiny Desk Concert" itself; effortlessly taking the series' emphasis on close-up intimacy and transporting it to new heights of, well... tininess.
However, this is, after all, a band that contains multitudes. Producers William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes craft a bed of Hip-Hop, glitchy Industrial, and Noisy Experimental music, then, set loose emcee Daveed Diggs, whose violent imagery summons 90's Horrorcore and a thousand Scary movies. The band's last two album titles—There Existed An Addiction to Blood & Visions of Bodies Being Burned—offer up a sense of the overall vibe here, but Diggs' gift for feverish rapid-fire wordplay, also, acts as a leavening agent. Lest we forget, he won a Tony Award for playing Thomas Jefferson AND Marquis de Lafayette in Hamilton and he still knows how to sell every word that leaves his lips. So, yeah, multitudes.
Plus, a few surprises to trick your eye and help pull you into a clever and disorienting world of sound are employed by clipping. within said clip. For their set, clipping. employ a handful of teeny tiny intruments and tools of ther tarde, including a mini-mic, itsy bisty beat machines, laptops, computers, chords, cables, knobs, and buttons, as well as some sort of eerie music box with a hand (well, finger) crank. During their 15-minute micro-set, clipping. rifle through six songs from throughout their ever-evolving career: "Something Underneath" & "Check The Lock" from Visions of Bodies Being Burned, "bout.that" from midcity (2014,) "Shooter" from the Wriggle EP (2016,) and "The Show" & "Nothing Is Safe" from There Existed An Addiction to Blood (2019.)
It's really something to see—maybe, on Full-Screen mode?—chock-full with plenty of surprises, memorable moments, and doll-sized subtleties. In addition to clipping.'s own Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes, their Tony Desk (Home) Concert features drummer and honorary fourth member Chukwudi "KWUDI" Hodge. Special shout-out go out to Cristina Bercovitz, Erin Bates & Daveed Diggs himself for filming the micro-sized concert footage seen here. It should, also, be of note that all of the adorable Tiny Furniture was fabricated by Cristina Bercovitz. We've included streams of a couple of the tracks heard within clipping.'s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert; see if you can spot the small differences between the album/EP vs. live versions. clipping.'s latest album, the phenomenally-titled Visions of Bodies Being Burned, is now avialble on Sub Pop Records.