Clams Casino Hip Hop
Although Clams Casino's excellent Instrumental Mixtape first appeared in spring of this year as a free-to-circulate zip file, its swanky coloured vinyl reissue on Type screams out for more attention. Not that it was exactly lacking for love when it first emerged: sizeable proportions of the (admittedly pretty niche) music-loving internet were quick to heap praise on Clams' translucent hip-hop instrumentals, and subsequent online mixes and a 12' on Tri Angle have swiftly snared him a growing audience. But what's been interesting is how its release immediately made his instrumentals themselves the focal point of attention. Where beforehand they served largely as anonymous, wispy backing tracks for the likes of 'BasedGod' Lil B (including the stunning, not-included-here 'I'm God'), Main Attrakionz and Soulja Boy, outside of a vocal context they were revealed as intricate enough to stand alone in their own right.
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So this physical release, under the clipped title Instrumentals, feels like an appropriate gesture. The sheer volume of music given away online ensures that people rarely listen to even half of the free material they download, simply because it's so easy to lose individual droplets in the deluge. So although only a fraction of listeners will end up actually buying it (not least thanks to the fact that its vinyl release is on quite a limited run), its very presence on Type - alongside the likes of Grouper, Peter Broderick and Richard Skelton - ought to ensure it gleans interest from an audience that might not usually pick up on an underground hip-hop record. Which, in the context of the music itself, is no bad thing; that a label whose tastes run right into post-classical modern composition have seen fit to put out Clams Casino speaks volumes about his potential for wider appeal.
'The EDM bleed has paid dividends for Mike Volpe, a Nutley native better known as Clams Casino, who has become one of the most sought-after digital designers in hip-hop's experimental universe. FACT mix 258: Clams Casino Page 1 of 2 If FACT was GQ (we wish), and did a Man of the Year award, Clams Casino would be pretty near the top of 2011’s contenders. A strong argument for Clams Casino as instrumental artist (even though it originally appeared as a backdrop for Lil B). Discover the best new music first with Pigeons & Planes The Next Wave Newsletter.
Though having said all of that, there's something so delightfully internetty about Clams' music that to impose any degree of physical permanence upon it seems something of a contradiction. His closest contemporaries, both sonically and in terms of methodology, aren't fellow hip-hop producers - they're web-age bedroom producers like Laurel Halo, Dan Lopatin, Hype Williams and Maria Minerva, those constructing almost dizzyingly referential tracks out of complex meshes of samples and analogue and digital sound sources. Listening to a Clams Casino track is a similar experience to listening to a Hype Williams track, in that recognisable fragments of sampled vocal occasionally lurch to the surface of the mix for a second or two before vanishing - or remain half-cloaked in the background throughout, like the spectral presence of Photek's 'Kanei' lurking in Hype's recent 'Rise Up'. And like Hype's music, Clams' instrumentals sound ephemeral and peculiarly of this moment, phantom aggregations of mood and sound that coalesce for brief periods of time before potentially disengaging at some undisclosed point in the future. That analysis feels even more fitting given Clams himself, a bedroom producer who sends his tracks out via email to potential vocalists, then frequently loses track of where they've travelled until they emerge into the public eye complete with MC chatter. His connection with Lil B further fuels his status as a post-Web 2.0 producer; B has a reputation for remaining almost constantly online, interacting with the outside world via social networks and an ongoing stream of musical content.
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Similarly to the likes of Halo and Lopatin, Clams' music is predominantly made up of synth: huge, rippling curtains of the stuff, with the contradictory property of sounding simultaneously impenetrably dense and almost totally weightless. Opener 'Motivation' explodes into action in peaking-in-the-red mode, its droning bursts of sub-bass distorting into a grainy haze as they hit full volume. Despite its colossal force, though, its physical impact is unexpectedly soothing, a balmy wash like standing waist-deep in tropical seawater. That's largely to do with the way that every available frequency is packed with something, even if only a growling undertow of white noise. The usual sources of abrasive, barbed sound - worming synth leads, snare hits, vocal samples - are cushioned and contained within a protective bubble of sonic interference. The overall effect is somewhat akin to listening through thick, viscous fluid. The previously unreleased, un-vocalled 'Numb' is a particularly good example, its androgynous voices, pitched in any number of different directions, arriving at the ear elongated into trailing siren songs.
Clams' sampling style is equally distinctive. While underneath the layers of superheated distortion his basic approach doesn't differ hugely from one common throughout hip-hop - taking short loops and extrapolating them to infinity - he uses almost entirely vocals, which he cut to pieces and allows to duck and dive in and out of audible range. On 'Illest Alive', a short snippet of Bjork's 'Bachelorette' looms to the surface and clips sharply, before reducing to wordless drift again. His treatment of distinctive voices - Bjork, Janelle Monáe on 'Cold War' - is reverent to the mood of the originals but unafraid to break them apart into constituent chunks to use as building blocks. However, while most tracks feature some human vocal presence, most of Clams' characters are anonymous, lonely and wordless, again in keeping with his tracks' webby, information overloaded feel.
This approach to track construction and sampling bears dwelling upon - though last year's short lived burst of interest in what was foolishly labeled 'witch house' (the gothic connection in most of it was tenuous to say the least, and it had fuck all to do with house) aimed to work within similar sonic boundaries, what's striking about Clams' music is how much more proficient it sounds. In fact, the thoughtful approach, attentiveness and depth of Instrumentals shows up many of that non-genre's key proponents as only shallowly engaging with their source material. Where Salem's attempts at dirty south hip-hop sounded forced and half-formed, even Clams Casino's baggiest tunes show an intrinsic understanding of their need for functionality as a backing track (even as, packed with detail, they transcend the need for an MC).
That said, unlike his more recent Rainforest EP on Tri Angle, which showcased some of his less tightly structured productions, the tracks on Instrumentals are far more closely linked to their original purpose as tools for MCs. Its final two tracks are its sparsest and most rhythmically immediate - the low slung beat and bass bulbs of 'She's Hot'; 'Cold War', where a stanza from Monae is left to run for a full three minutes, only occasionally tampered with. While quite some distance from the heaving columns of sound that make up the majority of the record, both are strong reminders that, despite their ghostly aura and presence on Type, these tracks remain intrinsically linked to the MCs that originally vocalled them. Listening to the instrumental and vocal takes back to back, the fact they work equally well in either role is testament to the versatility and subtlety of their construction.
Sweatshirt by Simon Miller. Jeans, worn throughout, by Acne Studios. Sunglass and sneakers, worn throughout, Volpe’s own.
- By
- Edwina Hagon
- Photography by
- Hector Perez
Styling by Javon Drake. Grooming by Eloise Cheung at Kate Ryan Inc. using Dermalogica.
The East Coast will forever remain the rightful home of pure, uncut rap music. It is where many of the genre’s seminal artists emerged during New York’s infamous block parties of the Seventies—old-school legends like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang—and where so many of rap’s defining landmarks continue to transpire. Who could forget the years marking the turn of the century when East Coast rappers like Nas, Busta Rhymes, Jay Z, and 50 Cent were dominating the airwaves with their self-assured lyricism, heavy hooks, and sharp wordplay?
For hip hop producer Michael Volpe, or Clams Casino as he is better known to his fans, the story starts here. “I first started listening to hip hop in the late Nineties—a lot of East Coast, New York hip hop, stuff like that,” he recalls. It was the period of rap music spilling over into the early Zeros that Volpe credits as the most influential time for him, musically speaking. For the then-fourteen-year-old, the next logical step was to purchase a sampler and start producing beats of his own.
Many years on from his early bedroom beat-making, the 29-year-old New Jersey native has plenty to feel good about. Since arriving on the scene in 2011 with his game-changing Instrumental Mixtape, his first of three acclaimed beat tapes under the guise of Clams Casino, Volpe has become a respected artist in his own right. He has accrued what could only be described as an unrivaled catalog of collaborations—A$AP Rocky, Lil B, FKA Twigs, and Blood Orange among them, not to mention the official remixes he has produced for hit machines like Sia, Lana Del Rey, and Florence and the Machine.
Jacket by Burberry.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that any of this came easily. “When I decided to take it seriously and get my beats out, the internet seemed like the best way to do it at the time, so I would use MySpace to send messages to artists’s and rappers’s pages. I would send out twenty or thirty messages a day asking what the best email was to send beats to,” Volpe explains. “That was it for two years, just building up that list of email contacts and sending beats out.” It was a slow burn fueled by patience and determination that above all awarded Volpe space and time to tinker away behind closed doors, crystalizing what would become his very own class of sonic logic.
Eventually, Volpe caught the attention of rapper Lil B, who was fast emerging as an eccentric, versatile, and brilliantly warped artist. “I was a big fan of his group, The Pack, and after a couple of weeks he answered, so that was a big one for me,” Volpe recalls. And so began a partnership that saw the rapper and producer reveal a bunch of breakout productions including Lil B’s 2009 track “I’m God.”
From the get-go, the young beat maker set himself apart from rap’s status quo, showcasing a distinct style of woozy, wistfully trippy, synth-laden productions for which he has become synonymous, awarding him labels like “influential,” “highly-imitated,” and “progressive.” “I’m happy that people recognize that I’m doing my own thing,” Volpe says. “To be recognized as somebody who’s an innovator—I’m happy that people describe me as that because it’s really what I like to do and what I set out to do.” With his technical dexterity and out-of-the-box thinking, Volpe has contributed to a larger conversation, effectively shaping a new territory for rap production that goes by the aptly named Cloud Rap—a spacey, cyber-born hip hop subgenre heavily popularized by indie artists and bedroom producers.
It’s a 94-degree day when we meet. New York is in the middle of a heat wave and Volpe has just wrapped his shoot, which may have entailed donning sweatshirts in the blistering East Village streets below. But Volpe doesn’t mind, because this week also marks the release of his début album, 32 Levels, for which the humble beatsmith has received quick praise. It’s an album that brought with it an explosion of deviated, dreamlike atmospheric and sedated beats that further establish its creator as one of hip hop’s more original minds and left-of-center producers.
In making 32 Levels, Volpe subverted all outside pressure, toiling away in earnest for two years with new sampling techniques and fresh sounds. “I experimented for a couple of years not really knowing what was going to happen. I never had any expectations for what it would come out like, so the whole thing has been a surprise as I went along,” he says. There’s a distinctly easygoing quality surrounding Volpe that visibly mirrors the artist’s gentle yet uncompromised approach to his craft—an approach that, judging by the wide-ranging roster of guest features on his twelve-track début, lends itself well to collaboration. “It’s cool because we usually meet somewhere in the middle. They’re happy to do something that maybe they can’t do with their own projects, so it’s a little bit of freedom for them, and for me, it helps push me out of my comfort zone,” Volpe says. “It’s like coming from both of these sides to make something that neither of us would have done otherwise.”
Sweatshirt by Simon Miller.
With collaborations spanning from musicians with whom he had previous working relationships like A$AP Rocky, Lil B, and Vince Staples to new recruits including Kelela, Sam Herring of Future Islands, Joe Newman of alt-j and Kelly Zutrau of Wet, as one may concede the album is expansive and unquestionably ambitious in its handling of such disparate sonic, vocal, and lyrical components. “I wanted to cover a wide range of moods and emotions,” Volpe explains. “Anybody that I respect and think is doing their own thing or who has distinctive voices like Sam Herring, I reach out to and see what happens.”
As Volpe tells, there is no tried and tested formula in place. “Each song is different and each artist is different,” he says. “Some of the songs have come about from beats I’ve made on my own and other times we’ll start from scratch, we’ll go into the studio and start playing things and writing together.” Yet despite such variables, the production of 32 Levels remains unmistakably Volpe—at once an ode to classic hip hop and a firm push towards a new paradigm for rap production.
Beyond a forthcoming tour that will see Volpe traversing the globe right up until February next year, the ambitious stylist cites film scoring as an endeavor he would like to explore one day. “I think it’s a natural progression for me, my music and sound,” he says. But in true Volpe style, there is no rush. “When the time is right for all that, it’ll happen. I don’t really force anything. When the time is right, I’ll know.”
32 Levels is out now.
Jacket by Burberry.
- By
- Edwina Hagon
- Photography by
- Hector Perez
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Styling by Javon Drake. Grooming by Eloise Cheung at Kate Ryan Inc. using Dermalogica.