But the Lil B we hear on these songs is different from the one we’ve heard on countless Clams tracks in the past.

Lil B is the album’s dominant voice and spirit animal he raps on three songs and plays hypeman on a fourth. The first half of the album is straight-up rap, Clams linking up again with some of his favorite collaborators.

But while Clams may not project an artistic voice, he does take care to show us how vivid and dextrous his sound is. It’s quite a trick.īecause Clams is a producer, and because he’s brought in different guests on just about every song, 32 Levels resonates more as a compilation than as an actual cohesive statement. And he’s done it without losing the dizzy unreality of his music. But on 32 Levels, his major-label debut, Clams has progressed into a great producer of songs, a real collaborator. Clams’ star really started to rise when he compiled the instrumental versions of the tracks he’d done with rappers like Lil B onto his Instrumental mixtapes it turned out that their dazed, broken beauty tended to come through more cleanly when it didn’t have Lil B chanting random phrases over it. The astral drift of his sound is closer to, say, Boards Of Canada than it is to just about any big-name rap producer. Even though Clams is no longer building tracks out of randomly downloaded songs, his music still has that feeling of displacement, of being unmoored. It hadn’t even occurred to him to get on the guest list.įive years later, Clams remains nearly as mysterious, even though he’s got a major label deal and an album full of guest stars even though we know what he looks like. He’d bought tickets to one of Lil B’s New York shows, but he’d left early because his friends couldn’t get in. I had no idea who the artists were or anything.” He’d never met Lil B.

He crafted tracks by seeking out samples based entirely on mood: “To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word - like ‘blue’ or ‘cold’ - into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results. He was Mike Volpe, a hospital intern and physical therapy student in his early twenties who just looked at music as some weird hobby. In 2011, my friend Ryan Dombal tracked down this figure who’d fascinated so many of us, and he learned that Clams Casino was just some guy, which somehow made him more interesting. When Lil B stepped away from the Pack, the Bay Area post-hyphy pop-rap group, and became a mantra-chanting internet enigma, he got a lot of his gravitas from Clams Casino, the mysterious producer who supplied him with dazed, gluey beats - Kanye West/Just Blaze-style sped-up soul samples, transformed into woozy, drifting fantasias of sound.

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