Instrumentals 2 Clams Casino
Listen free to Clams Casino – Instrumentals 2 (Caves, Human). 2 tracks (7:11). Discover more music, concerts, videos, and pictures with the largest catalogue online at Last.fm. CREDIT: Clams Casino - Instrumentals 2. When Clams Casino released his first Instrumentals mixtape just over a year ago, he was living off the rap grid, studying to be a physical therapist at home. Clams Casino - Instrumentals 2. VOTES SCORE VIEWS. Play Mixtape launches audio player.
In a little over a year Mike Volpe, aka Clams Casino has gone from the best kept secret in internet-based hip-hop production sorcery to major label-adorned A-lister. At least as a critical presence. I can’t help but view Clams’ newest release, the free Instrumental Mixtape 2, as a neatly symmetrical bookend at one end of the fourteen month span that began with the New Jersey-based producer’s first free tape. Each track on the new tape still includes the bracketed rapper who ultimately ended up claiming the beat and a couple artists who proved to be the most prominent on Instrumental Mixtape remain ever present on 2: Lil B and Main Attrakionz. But aside from Volpe’s own consistent knack for operatic, high-emotion bangers, a further focused production style, an excellent Tri Angle EP, and his general prolificness, Clams Casino owes a lot of his prominence to A$AP Rocky’s debut, LiveLoveA$AP (and vice versa).
Volpe seems to acknowledge A$AP as the elephant in the room by knocking out the first three productions he contributed to LiveLoveA$AP (“Palace”, “Bass”, “Wassup”) at the beginning of Instrumental Mixtape 2 as the first three tracks. More than a few people in my general social network ecosystem were quick to mention (or complain) how overfamiliar these tracks now are. It’s true, one of the few reasons I was quick to take to LiveLoveA$AP when it was initially released was because of Clams’ presence, so all three tracks I’ve heard enough for A$AP’s aloof flow to follow the now stripped beats in aural ghost form. At least at first. Because, yes, when that first descending sub-bass tone opens the mixtape at the beginning of “Palace” it’s hard not to prepare for the New Yorker’s voice to follow, but, as it was with the first tape – in fact, what made it so revelatory – is that Volpe is just as good, if not better, without an MC to otherwise obfuscate the intricacies of his productions. “Palace” is especially excellent without a voice astride it. It’s syncopated, purposeful sense of pace seems to hang in spurts of a timeless, dystopic magic-hour haze, each snare impact playing tension-release games between a crashing chorus of smokey voices.
Past the first three tracks most of the rest of Instrumental Mixtape 2 is new to me. Clams’ production style lends itself to a bedrock, set-in-stone kind of feel. There’s not a lot of wiggle room to debate, as a listener, where these songs might have diverged from where we find them and as such it’s almost moot to compare one mixtape to the other. But I will say, 2 feels like a complete document whereas the first tape dipped a little near its middle. Otherwise, trying to decide if “Motivation” is a better cut than “Palace” isn’t perhaps the best use of our time. 2 is unequivocally excellent.
The other track I recognized as the mixtape was initially loaded into my iTunes was “The Fall”, which appeared on The Weeknd’s gorgeous final release of last year, Echoes Of Silence. But the track is marked with “original mix” in parentheses and it’s almost unrecognizable in comparison to the version that ended up in The Weeknd’s hands. Instead of a jagged, sticky slap bass riff and marching percussion, we get a reverent, shuddering chime sample echoing downward forever – chunks of an abandoned cityscape slipping like dead skin into the ocean – while a deep, booming vocal sample fades into darkness. “Human” is the only unreleased track included on the tape. The track is all squishy, warped vocals and spaghetti western-ish guitar. Both songs are early highlights, and both are structured in that prototypical Clams Casino style without at all feeling like rehashes.
2 also includes a few remixes, a couple of which made the rounds earlier this year such as Washed Out’s “Amor Fati”, which gets turned into a squelching low-energy 4/4 warble, and Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die”, which also gets rendered unrecognizable, rearranged into mechanical puffs of noir-ish smoke and isolated, hollowed-out percussion intricacies before exploding into squalling white noise. The two Lil B-proffered productions are late standouts. “Unchain Me” circles around a lush lullaby chorus and a screaming-to-the-heavens rock vocal sample and the Imogen Heap-sampling “I’m God” sounds like something off AraabMusik’s Electronic Dream from the last year, it’s bit crushed vocals and tightened, submerged bass driving like electric guitars.
Instrumental Mixtape 2 almost feels like a foregone conclusion. It’s just a rich as last year’s free release, if not more so. Clams Casino continues to build his dynasty as one of the best and most uniquely defined producers working out of a number of different camps (Lil B, A$AP, Tri Angle). Despite his fingerprints reaching artists, essentially, across the continent, he remains completely isolated and actively felt in his own work. That he can release a mixtape of beats others have already ransacked, yet listeners can derive a wholly different experience from it is a little crazy. 2 finds Volpe further sharpening his very-identifiable style as well as broadening with tracks like “Kissing on My Syrup” and “Unchain Me”. If these mixtapes become an annual thing, it’ll be a neat little way of checking in on the realtime evolution of one of the most compelling producers currently at work. We can only hope.
When Clams Casino released his first Instrumentals mixtape just over a year ago, he was living off the rap grid, studying to be a physical therapist at home in New Jersey and putting together head-blown rap beats in his spare time, entirely as a hobby. He’d supplied a bunch of instrumentals to Lil B, and he’d randomly placed a few beats on a Soulja Boy mixtape or two, but he wasn’t making any money for his work, and he didn’t particularly expect to. When my friend Ryan Dombal interviewed him for Pitchfork around that time, he said that he’d never met Lil B, his closest collaborator. He’d bought a ticket for one of B’s New York shows, but he’d left early because the show was sold out and his friends couldn’t get it. (Ryan said something like: “Dude, I think you probably could’ve gotten in for free.”) The tracks on that first Instrumentals tape had mostly already lived as rap songs, but for most of us, they weren’t especially familiar rap songs; we hadn’t fully internalized those random Lil B mixtape tracks. And now that Clams has gotten around to releasing his second Instrumentals tape, his circumstances couldn’t be more different, even if his music relies on the same feelings and sensations.
Over the past 15 or 16 months, the music that Clams was making at home in New Jersey has become a sort of aesthetic movement, one that’s come to dominate certain corners of the instrumental rap landscape. His style is all hazy, swoony gloop. His drums hit hard sometimes, but he’s not exactly working in the Pete Rock/DJ Premier tradition — or, if he is, he’s pushing the trippier elements of that sound way past their logical extreme. Samples burble up from the deep and then sniff themselves out; it’s almost like those pieces of vocal are in the process of drowning. The bass-pulses are faraway echoes. His sound is the rap beat as haunted-house new-age, and it’s a big part of the reason why a space-cadet rapper as disconnected and undisciplined as Lil B can sometimes sound close to brilliant. In a way, his sound has as much to do with the Orb or early Aphex Twin as it does with DJ Shadow or the Heatmakerz, perhaps accidentally. And hearing a collection of Clams beats with no rappers only amplifies those feelings. Without those voices, his music becomes pure longing drift. It’s often just beautiful.
Clams Casino Instrumentals 2 Download
But now there’s a familiarity to Clams, and the tracks he’s chosen for Instrumentals 2 are among his best-known. The first track on Instrumentals 2 is ASAP Rocky’s “Palace,” which was also the first track on LIVELOVEA$AP, one of the past year’s best-known and most important mixtapes. At first, it’s hard to focus on the instrumental itself, since that instrumental now has its own associations; I can’t hear that opening cymbal-smash and those sampled choral vocals without mentally filling in Rocky’s absent introduction (“Unh, goddam, how real is this”). The songs that appear in instrumental form on Instrumentals 2 are, for the most part, big songs — tracks that Clams made for Rocky or the Weeknd, or his remixes for Lana Del Rey and Washed Out (now stripped of all traces of the original tracks). He’s included his instrumental for the best song that Lil B has ever recorded (“I’m God”) and the most instantly-recognizable beat he’s made for B (“Unchain Me,” which prominently samples the “thou shalt not kill” song from The Lost Boys). Clams hasn’t exactly had a pop breakthrough, but there’s a beat here from an honest-to-god #1-on-Billboard album: Mac Miller’s “One Last Thing,” now blessedly free of Mac Miller. When most of these beats don’t exist in a vacuum, when they’ve basically already had a life as underground hits, it’s a bit harder to give yourself completely over to the ebb and flow of the mixtape. It’s distracting.
Clams Casino Instrumentals 2 Tracklist
But then, that distraction-level is also a powerful reminder of how far Clams has come in a short time. The sound he helped to pioneer, the one that’s come to be known as “cloud-rap,” has taken on a life of its own, and Clams has taken his rightful place at its forefront. On some level, he’s still just some relatively anonymous guy making rich-in-feeling tracks on his computer in his basement, but now those tracks have proved durable enough to stand on their own, as actual songs. And after a few spins, Instrumentals 2 starts to lose the displacing weirdness of deja vu and to play on its own. Instrumentals 2 is still brand-new, so it’s only starting to lose those associations for me. But the great thing about Clams’ sound is that it can completely fill up a room and transform whatever mundane activity you’re engaged in into something grandly, romantically dark. It’s perfect rainy-day background music, and it’s strange and fascinating to consider the idea that rainy-day background music is now a huge part of underground rap. If the first Instrumentals tape marked the moment where Clams announced his arrival, this new one — the updated resume — is the one where he forces us to come to grips with the strange and improbable form of dominance he’s achieved.
Download Instrumentals 2 for free here.