noculcemos1978.netlify.com

Freestyle beat, beat, free trap beat, trap beat, rap beat, beats, instrumental, trap, free type beat, trap type beat, free type beat 2020, type beat 2020, type beat.

1. Clams Casino helped define the sound of the 2010s.Throughout the decade, the New Jersey-based producer—born Michael Volpe—specialized in beats booming and vast, and lighter than air.
2. Clams Casino Talks '32 Levels,' Lil B and Hip-Hop's Shrinking Attention Span. And it nearly happened to Clams Casino. The 29-year-old beatsmith Clams Casino.
3. Clams Casino doesn’t immediately strike you as one of hip-hop’s most in-demand producers. Quiet, unassuming and equipped with a New Jersey accent that gives his words a no-nonsense brevity, Michael.

Michael Volpe (born May 12, 1987), known professionally as Clams Casino, is an Italian-American record producer and songwriter from Nutley, New Jersey.^[1][2] Volpe is currently signed to Columbia Records and Sony Music. He has produced tracks for artists such as ASAP Rocky,^[3]Lil B,^[4]Vince Staples,^[5]Joji,^[6] and Mac Miller^[7] and has also remixed works by Big K.R.I.T.,^[8]Washed Out,^[9] and Lana Del Rey.^[10]

Career[edit]

A resident of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, Volpe got his start in music tinkering with keyboards while he was a student at Nutley High School.^[11]

Clams Casino Hip Hop Dances

Volpe's official debut EP Rainforest was released through Tri Angle Records on June 27, 2011.^[12] His Instrumentals mixtape was released on March 7, 2011,^[13] followed by the release of Instrumentals 2 on June 5, 2012^[14] and Instrumentals 3 on December 18, 2013.^[15] The mixtapes were distributed for free through his website.

Volpe contributed a score for Locomotor, a work choreographed by his cousin Stephen Petronio released on April 4, 2014.^[16] He released his debut studio album 32 Levels through Columbia Records on July 15, 2016. He followed it up with his Instrumentals 4 mixtape, released on June 26, 2017.

In April 2020, Clams Casino cleared the Imogen Heap sample for his instrumental 'I'm God', which first appeared on Lil B's 2009 album 6 Kiss.^[17][18] The song remains his most popular song with nearly 25 million views on Youtube.

Musical style[edit]

Volpe's music has been described as '[bringing] together conventional hip-hop drums, a sensitive ear for off-to-the-side melodies, and an overdose of oddly moving atmosphere.'^[19] Associated genres include witch house and cloud rap.

Discography[edit]

Studio albums[edit]

Mixtapes[edit]

Extended plays[edit]

Singles[edit]

As lead artist[edit]

As featured artist[edit]

Compilations[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Kuperinsky, Amy (January 8, 2012). 'Making a scene: A new generation of New Jersey hip-hop asserts itself'. New Jersey On-Line.
2. ^Dombalon, Ryan (March 31, 2011). 'Rising: Clams Casino'. Pitchfork Media.
3. ^Lester, Paul (November 17, 2011). 'New band of the day – No 1,151: Clams Casino'. The Guardian.
4. ^Montes, Patrick (May 16, 2013). 'Producer Clams Casino on His 'Weird' Relationship with Our 4Knots After Party Headliner Lil B'. Village Voice. Archived from the original on 2014-02-02. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
5. ^'Vince Staples Hops on Clams Casino's 'All Nite''. Highsnobiety. 2016-06-10. Retrieved 2017-01-08.
6. ^'Joji teams with Clams Casino for new single 'CAN'T GET OVER YOU''. The FADER. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
7. ^Roos, Brandon E. (November 27, 2011). 'Clams Casino Talks Making Strong Connections With Mac Miller And A$AP Rocky'. HipHopDX. Archived from the original on October 31, 2014. Retrieved February 13, 2014.
8. ^Martin, Andrew (December 20, 2011). 'Listen: Big K.R.I.T. 'Moon & Stars (Clams Casino Remix)''. Complex.
9. ^Thiessen, Brock (November 9, 2011). 'Washed Out – 'Amor Fati' (Clams Casino remix)'. Exclaim!. Archived from the original on 2014-12-13. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
10. ^Adams, Gregory (January 17, 2012). 'Lana Del Rey – 'Born to Die' (Clams Casino remix)'. Exclaim!. Archived from the original on 2014-12-13. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
11. ^Olivier, Bobby. 'How this Nutley artist became New Jersey's latest music pioneer', NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, December 21, 2016. '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.... 'It's great, how easy it is to get stuff out, and make music at home and all the sudden people everywhere can hear it,' he says, from his home in Hasbrouck Heights.... The Nutley High School grad first began to tinker with beats as a teen, fooling around with basic keyboards and synthesizers, much simpler ones than the machines now scattered around his basement home studio.'
12. ^Sharp, Elliott (July 5, 2011). 'Guide To New Music, 7/5/11: New Releases by Clams Casino, Exhumed, Memory Tapes, and Pursuit Grooves'. Philadelphia Weekly. Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
13. ^Reynaldo, Shawn (January 2, 2012). 'Clams Casino Offers 'Instrumentals' for Free'. XLR8R. Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
14. ^Shaw, Steve (June 12, 2012). 'Clams Casino: Instrumentals 2'. Fact.
15. ^Fitzmaurice, Larry (January 8, 2014). 'Clams Casino: Instrumental Tape 3'. Pitchfork Media.
16. ^Seibert, Brian (April 4, 2014). 'Come Here, Look Back, Move Forward – Stephen Petronio Company Marks Its 30th Anniversary'. The New York Times.
17. ^'10 songs you need in your life this week'. The FADER. Retrieved 2020-05-02.
18. ^Chris. 'Clams Casino's legendary, Imogen Heap-sampling 'I'm God' finally gets an official release'. GORILLA VS. BEAR. Retrieved 2020-05-02.
19. ^'Clams Casino: Instrumental Mixtape'. Pitchfork. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
20. ^Yoo, Noah (October 29, 2019). 'Clams Casino Announces New Album Moon Trip Radio, Shares New Song 'Rune': Listen'. Pitchfork. Retrieved October 30, 2019.

External links[edit]

• clammyclams on SoundCloud
• ClamsCasinoMusic's channel on YouTube
• Clams Casino discography at Discogs

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.

Clams Casino Hip Hop Songs

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

Clams Casino Hip Hop Instrumentals

Styling by Javon Drake. Grooming by Eloise Cheung at Kate Ryan Inc. using Dermalogica.