clipping’s latest effort “Splendor & Misery”, is a Sci-Fi dystopian concept album that is both futuristic and yet describes our increasingly frightening and bizarre time. And since the release of the album I’ve written about its first three singles “Baby Don’t Sleep,” “Air ‘Em Out” and “A Better Place” and each single manage to further cement the trio’s reputation for pairing minimalist and industrial productions with Diggs’ rapid fire rhyming — but at points the material reveals a subtle refinement of their sound in which at times the material is both melodic and radio-friendly, while evoking the impending apocalypse or the immensity, senselessness and indifference of the universe, the nature of man’s mind and so on.

Recently the trio was invited to Moog Sound Lab to perform “Taking Off” off Splendor & Misery and the video reveals how the trio creates their eerily fucked and hellish sonic vision live — in the case of this song clattering and clinking synths, stuttering drum programming are paired with Diggs ridiculously dexterous rhyming, in which he rhymes about gangstas riding rockets into the sky by getting fucked up in a parking lot, late at night, surreal, almost disconnected violence. And of course they do so while using a ton of really awesome Moog gear.