Giant Claw

Keith Rankin's output under the Giant Claw name delivers the same hallucinatory hues and erratic turns found in his vivid visual designs. The project, active since its 2010 launch, has issued a wide array of recordings that span twisted prog and psychedelic forms on 2012's Mutant Glamour, footwork blended with vaporwave on 2014's Dark Web, and thick neo-classical assemblages on 2021's Mirror Guide. Alongside Seth Graham, with whom he records equally strange, uncategorizable work as Cream Juice, Rankin operates the wide-ranging and prolific Orange Milk Records imprint. He creates artwork for the majority of its titles, among them albums by Sean McCann, Foodman, and Jerry Paper, as well as records on additional imprints by Guerilla Toss, Giraffage, and Sedcairn Archives. His contributions as a member of the prolific vaporwave outfit Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv have also drawn widespread praise.

The artist, based in Columbus, Ohio, issued his first Giant Claw cassettes in 2010, coinciding with the launch of Orange Milk alongside his co-founder. After multiple tapes and CD-Rs appeared on imprints such as Digitalis and Bridgetown Records, the project reached vinyl for the first time in 2012 via the EP Haunted Planet on Wool Recordings and the LP Mutant Glamour on Orange Milk. Diverging sharply from those warped and whimsical Krautrock-inflected efforts, Rankin explored a more shadowy, filmic dimension on Music for Film, released in 2013 by Constellation Tatsu. Additional 2013 titles, among them Impossible Chew on Field Hymns and Max Mutant on Tranquility Tapes, delved into sources including chiptune, free jazz, and library music. Dark Web, Giant Claw's 2014 album issued jointly by Orange Milk and Noumenal Loom, merged footwork with contemporary R&B in a postmodern mashup. The MIDI symphony Deep Thoughts arrived the following year, while Giant Claw vs. Guerilla Toss, Rankin's rework of five tracks by the New York punk-funk group, came out on DFA in 2016. Orange Milk put out the fragmented yet expansive Soft Channel in 2017. Giant Claw resurfaced in 2021 with the virtual cello concerto Mirror Guide.