CLIPPING - Live In Brisbane
Conga Lines And Colonoscopies
Thursday 11th June 2026
Written by Tom Wilson
Photographed by: Rashid AlKamraikhi
Nothing Is Safe From The DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN of Rap
Sense has ensconced itself in the heavy and alternative music spheres, but Rashid and I are also massive fans of rap – my MESHUGGAH back patch is flanked by the likes of HO99O9, WU-TANG and CYPRESS HILL – so we are excited to descend up the Princess Theatre as OPEN SEASON sends us to cover our first rap show.
There’s a lot of tension in this country at the moment, so when I make my entrance to The Princess Theatre and see a guy in a high vis onstage yelling about Pauline Hanson, it seems par for the course. TOECUTTER looks like Bill Bailey if he was a tradie, skullet and all, and works the decks like a wizard with severe ADD, resulting in one of the most chaotic, disorganised and memorable sets I’ve ever seen. Songs are abandoned halfway through because “I get bored with my own music”, glitches are frequent, he controls his theremin via headbutt, and his sampler runs out of batteries halfway through the set, prompting him to vamp on the mic while thumbing in new ones. For anyone else, this would be the worst gig of their career, but TOECUTTER appears to embrace the chaos, and aside from one dickhead attempting a heckle behind me, the Princess Theatre appears to be along for the ride. For the last song he leaps into the crowd and starts a conga line that snakes jubilantly around the venue, and he gets a massive cheer when he finally says his goodbyes.
Pictured: TOECUTTER
Pictured: TOECUTTER
Pictured: TOECUTTER
Pictured: TOECUTTER
After the changeover, the screen behind the stage flickers to life. It’s a Youtube video of Ice-T standing over a wheelie bin destroying a Macbook with a hammer while his wife Coco films it. For several minutes, we watch him smash apart circuitry and joke with Coco that they’ll try to return it to the Apple Store, before he holds a spoked piece of plastic up in front of the camera and says, “Cooling prongs.” Instantly, the video starts to glitch as Youtube disrupts and distorts before our eyes, repeating the words over and over, and we realise we’ve been had. We aren’t watching a Youtube video at all. That opening rug-pull prepares us for the creative lunacy of COOLING PRONGS, as Christopher Fleeger starts whacking on pads to construct entire worlds out of sounds he has captured. “Ya’ll like field recordings?” He asks to a massive roar. It’s a CLIPPING show and he’s definitely in the right room. He tells us that as soon as he arrived in the hotel that day, he stuck microphones out the window to capture the city sounds and put them right back into the set. This means that we are literally hearing music created by our city that day, and it feels special to know that we are hearing a completely unique performance. What we see turns out to be pretty unique too, as he pulls out what I unfortunately recognise as a colonoscopy camera, bends over and appears to penetrate himself, and the projection screen is lit up with footage from inside someone’s arse. Is it real? We still don’t know, but we won’t soon forget it.
Pictured: COOLING PRONGS
Pictured: COOLING PRONGS
Pictured: FCOOLING PRONGS
Pictured: COOLING PRONGS
Half a lifetime ago, when I was about 19, a friend introduced me to an album called Suspended Animation from the band FANTOMAS, and I was plunged to a totally new world of music, which took the verse-chorus-verse structure of traditional music and hurled it out the window, eschewing accessibility in favour of raw creativity and avant garde sensibilities. From there it only got weirder, as the Mike Patton rabbit hole led me to people like John Zorn and Trey Spruance, who twist music into such obtuse shapes that notions like “genre” no longer apply. But it took almost twenty years for me to discover that the rap world also had its disruptors, who challenge the very notion of what rap can sound like. Taking PUBLIC ENEMY’s love of shrill samples (Terminator X to the Edge of Panic is a prime example) and pushing it to the extreme, CLIPPING are rap’s DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN. A beat made entirely of glass bottles being smashed? A freestyle rap over what sounds like tinnitus? Nothing is off-limits. Nothing is too crazy. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is safe.
Nothing is…
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
They take to the stage and drop into Run It, Daveed’s marvellous voice chopping at high-velocity as William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes loom over their equipment, stacking layers of harsh noise higher and higher as Nigerian-American Sharon Udoh tinkers on a piano. Dodger sees Daveed reach insane speeds over a beat that sounds like a fax machine having a seizure, syllables machine-gunning from his lips, and I cannot take my eyes off him. It’s hypnotic, almost superhuman, and I’m embarrassed to say that it was only the next morning when I realised that he played Our Father on The Boys, a superhero who can control people with the power of his voice. Surprisingly, he is not the most powerful voice onstage tonight. That would be Sharon, and whenever she sings a hook, Daveed melts off to one side to watch her in awe. The one-two punch of Dominator and Body & Blood gives us a neck workout, before the epic Nothing is Safe segues into All in Your Head, and they say their goodbyes.
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
Pictured: CLIPPING
We’re not done, and neither are CLIPPING, and when they emerge for the encore, Sharon gets her time to shine with her cover of Sam Waymon’s Blood of the Thing (Part 2). The entire Princess Theatre is hanging off her every word, and when the rest of the band join her for Blood of the Fang, it’s one of those chef’s kiss moments. Work Work and Enlacing bring the night to a close, and as we ride home, I’m haunted by two questions: was that a real colonoscopy? And how the hell am I going to express just how amazing our first rap show was?
Well, how did I do?
Pictured: CLIPPING
Photos by: Rashid AlKamraikhi
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