It was 2013 when Mike Volpe last released a volume of his instrumental tapes series and he was near the most visible point of his influence. The dense, thumping beats he created as the producer Clams Casino had, in the previous five years, become an undeniable part of the hip-hop mainstream. Each instrumental was a nebulous ecosystem, enveloping the accompanying rap verses in a cloud of weed smoke. The style was so influential that it birthed a subgenre, cloud-rap, and spawned a universe of imitators.
Volpe’s contributions—his skittering layers of drums and bass thump, his oozing samples—have changed the genre for good. But the intervening years have pushed the producer into a different lane. He’s a veteran now, and instead of continuing to innovate, he’s chosen to step into the background and refine his sound, collaborating with favorites like Vince Staples and A$AP Ferg, contributing to a diverse array of pop albums, and furthering his own solo career with last year’s debut 32 Levels. To hear a full collection of his recent work, on Instrumental Mixtape 4, is to consider Clams Casino in a new light, as an architect contributing new designs in a city whose skyline he helped shape.
The 13 beats here—two of them original, the others culled from various projects—are, for the most part, in the mold that made Casino’s name with gaseous, disembodied vocal samples, deep pockets of negative space. Three come from Staples’ Summertime ’06 and two others debuted as Ferg tracks. “Elastic Heart” is a remix of the Sia record of the same name; “Stem/Long Stem” is a DJ Shadow remix. Given the time that’s passed and in comparison to the Soundcloud offerings that have followed, the work on the new tape sounds more top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame.
If anything has changed, it seems to be the producer’s recognition of his own importance to the venture; his beats in recent years have been bolder, with their own outsize personalities. The beats for “Norf Norf” and “Worth It” were always obvious gems. Here, it takes several listens to shed the memories of Vince Staples and Danny Brown respectively, both of whom scribbled compellingly in the blank space of those tracks with their typical hyperactive bars. But with no voices present, attention is drawn to the flick of the snare that interrupts the drawn out synths of the “Norf Norf” beat, the gasps of air pulsating within the latticework of “Worth It.” “Wavey,” one of the original tracks, stands as one of the best offerings here, as Clams colors with the same palette as “Norf Norf,” but allows his vocal samples the space to play. Distorted beyond all recognition, they nonetheless sound alive, and the track is startlingly emotional and touching in its vulnerability. The same is true of the “Stem/Long Stem” remix, which immediately follows. With its twinkling, almost tender profundity, it sounds about as close as Volpe could get to creating a lullaby.
The beats here generally fall into two separate categories based on their momentum. The Staples’ and Ferg beats, along with the original opener “Say Your Prayers” and the quick-hit Kali Yuga (originally a beat for Ghostmane) drive forward with more muscle, a sense of internal momentum. The remixes, on the other hand, tend to drift by, their countervailing rhythms confusing the passage of time. Combining both modes is “Time,” which is about the most danceable track that Casino has ever made, its wistful samples more solid than his usual work and its surprising structure giving it a gasp of momentum even as it fades out. (The track was included on the enormous #savefrabic compilation cobbled together last year on behalf of the shuttered London club.)
Casino’s style, as much as anyone else’s, helped to define the sound of rap online in the early 2010s, giving artists from a wide variety of backgrounds a shared vocabulary. There was a time when hitmakers like Drake, A$AP Rocky, and The Weeknd flocked to that sound—now, all have moved on to brighter, sharper things. Volpe could have gambled on a reinvention, a new signature that could recreate the influence he wielded a couple years earlier. Instrumental Tape 4 demonstrates that he’s made a wiser, safer choice, perfecting his skills, growing his ego, working with the right people and finding new pockets in his sound. All the while, he’s continued to turn out raw, melodramatic beats that remain remarkably powerful, even if their ingredients have grown familiar.
