Who is clams casino

He hit me right back. He sent that right back to me. I liked it and I kept sending him stuff from there. I had fun. Was that the same situation where they just hit you up? Yeah, they just approached me. So it attracted a whole 'nother crowd. Those labels just hit me up were really into the music, so I started talking to them. I had a bunch of stuff that I was trying to get rappers on sitting around.

No, I would check out some of the stuff. Stuff on Tri Angle, some of their artists like Balam Acab. It seems like the worlds of hip-hop and experimental music, at least on the underground level, are merging. Yeah, definitely. What do you mean? I thought that was funny. Now, that was originally intended as an instrumental you would send a rap artists? That was actually kind of half and half.

It could go either way. Even before I put out the original instrumental mixtape out, somebody originally gave me the idea of doing instrumental stuff. So that one was half and half.

I did send that to rappers, but I was thinking also that it might be cool just as an instrumental. It involves a lot more than a regular hip-hop beat.

But I did send that to a rapper. I think I sent it to Soulja Boy. He was the first rapper I sent that to. How did that come to pass and what came of that? I was trying to send him stuff. That was the first thing I ended up doing with him, a freestyle on that beat. But I never really talked to him. Then he wanted to do a whole mixtape. We did end up doing a lot of songs, but never put a whole tape out.

More people should do that. People would never expect him to rap on stuff that I sent him, but he wanted stuff like that and he used it. Is that safe to say? Especially me. I never really thought about that. The guys I work with a lot like Main Attrakionz , they just make music to make music.

They just love to do it. I like working with guys that think like that. A lot. Your EP on Tri Angle got a lot of praise and I was wondering if you see yourself working more on instrumentals. Maybe you wanna put some vocals on there and work with someone, but will you be working more on solo stuff, Clams Casino stuff in the future? I definitely see myself doing more solo stuff down the road.

Just one more. Yeah, I do that. So I got used to doing that every time. But now people are putting my name on it more. You were talking earlier about how once you send your beats out through emails and stuff, it gets out of your hands at that point.

Has that ever happened? One more question. If you could pick one MC of all time to work with, who would it be? Or group. Good choice. But yeah, it seems like you can hear Heatmakerz doing that multi-tiered vocal sample thing there. People just put out stuff for free all the time online now. So it does happen a lot where you have two or three people on the same beat. It feels like you hustled really hard just to get shit to people.

Skip to Content. Ten years after it became a cult hit, cloud rap's seminal track has finally been given an official release. We speak to beatmaker Michael Volpe about the incredible story of 'I'm God'. By Katie Cunningham. It might be all of 64 kbps, ripped straight from YouTube, or still graffitied with metadata from a long since ed blog.

Such was the download game in It first surfaced in as a vehicle for rap oddball Lil B, before an instrumental version was set free onto the internet two years later. Never officially released, it quickly became a cult favourite: disseminated on file-sharing services and uploaded to YouTube by fans, where it went viral. But its legacy goes beyond just play counts. Put in historical context, the track marked a couple of important micro-revolutions for music. In the late aughts and early s, emerging producers and rappers would connect on email and build tracks together without ever meeting face to face.

With no record labels in the way, they would chuck their handiwork on random file-sharing links or MySpace pages something that unintentionally lent the songs an impermanence. Finding the gems required keeping an ear to the ground; knowing who to listen to and where to dig. The sound of cloud rap was murky and morose melodies paired with hip-hop drums, purpose designed to be spacious enough to be rapped over.

To mark the occasion, we spoke to Clams Casino, aka New Jersey beatmaker Michael Volpe, about ten years as an underground hero. Whatever happened to hip-hop sub-genre cloud rap? Used by critics as shorthand for any sort of …. Read Story.

Where were you at with your career then? I was really early on. The main sound is a hardware synth through some guitar pedals that I recorded at my favourite studio in LA -- The Ship -- when I was working on my own project. I wasn't really making too many beats out there though, I was mostly just recording sounds and samples to flip when I got back home to my own studio. When I got back to my apartment in New Jersey some time after that, I pulled up this long recording of the samples I made in LA and listened through.

That little part immediately stuck out to me and I started from there. The drum programming is kind of funny because I was really just throwing in random samples without thinking about the sounds or where they would go, so that part is super sporadic I was just having fun with it.

It came together really quickly and naturally, without much thought at all, which is how I knew it was a special one. Sitting at his kitchen island, the thick PC laptop he uses to produce closed shut on the counter nearby, he describes a phenomenon that seems to have defined his process. I don't know where it's coming from. Maybe I'll figure it out down the road. It's just kind of a weird unconscious thing where it's coming out, and I'm feeling regular. The biggest change in the way Volpe makes music began out of necessity around the creation of his debut studio album, 32 Levels.

In order to avoid copyright infringement, he dispensed with the vocal samples that had defined the ethereal sound of his early production, instead building up an extensive sample bank from found sounds and recording sessions.