Many prominent rap producers parlay their notoriety into touring careers, taking checks to spin their hits on the road, or they lose their signature sound and become “super-producers,” bending their sounds to fit the needs of a given artist. Not Clams Casino. After helping invent cloud rap near the beginning of the decade—lending his hazy, arcane beats to A$AP Rocky, the Weeknd, and Vince Staples—the New Jersey producer born Mike Volpe has devoted himself to refining his oft-copied brand of atmospheric beat music.
After 2016’s major-label debut 32 Levels, featuring vocal turns from singers like Kelela and Future Islands’ Sam T. Herring, it seemed like Volpe was ready to consolidate his own star power. But the album came and went, and Clams Casino was no more a household name than before it was released. This, it seems, is just how he likes it. The following year, he returned to his long-running Instrumental Mixtape series for a fourth edition, and now he’s released his second album, Moon Trip Radio. No longer beholden to the requirements of a major, he eschews features; instead, Volpe gives us an unadulterated stream of his ambient hip-hop amalgam.
By now, the Clams formula is an essential part of 2010s rap canon. His legacy can be felt in the druggy, washed-out productions of SoundCloud rap producers like Ronny J—drums forward, bass up, atmospheres of druggy malaise smeared across the background like black paint and perpetuated by lo-fi samples. Moon Trip Radio’s opening track (and lead single) “Rune“ instantly feels like classic Clams, an ominous and alien-sounding vocal sample perfectly setting the tone for granular textures to come. It sounds like it could have been made at any point of his career.
Nonetheless, there’s a clear arc throughout the album, and by the midpoint, Clams—who used to source new sounds by typing search terms like “cold” and “blue” into LimeWire—is offering some of his warmest-sounding music. The songs are as sonically destroyed as ever, bristling with digital flotsam and tape hiss—see “Twilit”—but the patient harmonic changes give the doomy atmospheres a certain sentimentality. Chopped breaks and angelic electric piano noodling on “Cupidwing” and “Fire Blue” invoke the lovelorn works of DJ Shadow, while “Lyre,” with its lonely guitars and wildlife recordings, reframes Clams as hip-hop’s own Daniel Lanois.
He’s said that he’s ready to get back to making “some fun rap shit or something” now that this new solo release is finished. But the album highlights the difference between Volpe and the myriad imitators in his wake: Anyone can oversaturate some moody samples and chalk it up to a “vibe,” but few can weave those disparate elements together in a compelling way that inspires the listener to fill in their own narratives.
