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clipping.
Gray Area Festival Performances

Join us in celebrating the closing night of Gray Area Festival 2022 with clipping., Haleek Maul, DeForrest Brown and Evicshen, four dynamic and unique performances bridging experimental, hip-hop, horrorcore, and electronic music.

Get access to our performances, conference talks, and exhibition with the Gray Area Festival Pass, or attend each night of performances with individual tickets.

Gray Area Festival Performance
Clipping.
Haleek Maul
DeForrest Brown
Evicshen

Saturday, October 1, 9pm – 1am

Audiovisual Concert
18+
$15-30

Gray Area
2665 Mission Street,
San Francisco

Proof of vaccination is required for all attendees over 12 years of age. Learn more
View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with your accommodation requests.

clipping.

clipping. is an American experimental hip-hop group from Los Angeles, California. The group consists of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. The group began in 2009 as a remix project, with Hutson and Snipes taking a cappellas of mainstream rap artists and making power electronics and noise remixes of them to amuse themselves. Diggs joined in 2010 and began to write his own raps over their compositions and the group self-released their first album, midcity, in 2013. The group has drawn comparisons to the likes of Dälek, Death Grips, My Bloody Valentine, Tim Hecker and Shabazz Palaces. The Guardian described their sound as “the sort of shrill thrills you imagine could function as incidental soundtrack music for a documentary about abattoirs or might conceivably be the work of a young band intent on twisting industrial metal into brutal new shapes. With rapping on top.” Rolling Stone called them “[n]imble-tongued, beat-fractured L.A. hip-hop spilled over the abrasive crunches, squeals, clangs, slurps, and static of experimental musique concrète.” As part of their experimental style, the band adhere to certain stylistic limitations. Their instrumentation is derived from real world samples (e.g. using recordings of bottles being hit or bricks breaking) instead of traditional instruments. Similarly, Diggs writes his rap in second person, all ‘I, me’ language is off limits.

Haleek Maul

Haleek Maul is an American rapper, record producer, and a founding member of the collective On the Tanz. He has collaborated with the likes of Deniro FarrarShady Blaze, Hot Sugar, and Saul Williams. Noisey has described him as “the new hustler of horrorcore”. In 2012 at age 16, Haleek Maul released his debut EP Oxyconteen which Spin named “Rap Release of the Week”, and Fact placed it at number 48 on the “50 Best Albums of 2012” list. In that year, he also released a collaborative mixtape with Chicago production duo Supreme Cuts, titled Chrome Lips, which Clash included it on the “Top 10 Mixtapes of the Year” list. He released a mixtape, Prince Midas, in 2015, an EP, In Permanence, in 2018, and his debut solo studio album, Errol, in 2020.

DeForrest Brown

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and elsewhere. Assembling a Black Counter Culture is Brown’s debut book.

Evicshen

Evicshen is the nom de guerre of San Francisco-based sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Shen's sound practice is concerned with the materiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analogue modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favour of extreme textures and gestural tones. Notable for her Needle Nails, Shen uses modified acrylic fingernails with embedded turntable needles, allowing her to play up to five grooves of a record at once. Her DIY approach extends to hand-made resin records embedded with found materials. Each piece functions not only as playable music media but a unique art object.