The most symbolic departure from traditional hip-hop comes in the spectral ‘Real S**t from a Real Nigga’ every time I listen, there’s a double-take to check the title. On album opener, ‘Motivation’, Casino guts the cod philosophy of Lil’ B, and we are left with a warm, booming space, complete with birdsong. But where Burial conjures rain and chill here, soaring synths radiate a slow glow that seems to light these tracks from below. The boom-bap of bass and snare provides the album’s spine, but its heart owes more to the glitch and hiss and ghostly vocals of Burial or Tri Angle stablemate, Balam Acab. A collection of these beats was uploaded onto Mediafire in March as a 160kbps bit-rate ‘Instrumental Mixtape’, Tri Angle released his ‘Rainforest’ EP in June and now Type are about to re-issue the ‘mixtape’ on vinyl.Ĭlams Casino has trimmed the fat from hip-hop’s jiggling booty.

Once a beat was built, he emailed the results out to rising rappers, such as Lil’ B and Souljah Boy, and waited. Infuriatingly for all those Facebook finger-waggers, Clams Casino is Mike Volpe, a 23 year-old physiotherapy student who has confessed that his sound collages are ‘just a hobby.’ He works on his beats from his mum’s New Jersey attic and describes his method succinctly: “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 ten results.” Not exactly rock ‘n’ roll. It is far too early to suggest that Clams Casino has the chops to join this illustrious group, but his music flirts with form and has, so far, evaded easy definition.Ĭlams Casino’s rise is the most modern of music stories. Over the past decade, some of the best music has come from artists who have shoved various genres in a blender and come up with something new, inimitable and often unpalatable to the masses….Flying Lotus, Burial, Kanye West, Radiohead, MIA, Animal Collective and James Blake.

Now don’t get me wrong: I like melodies, musicianship and witty lyrics as much as the next Slipknot fan, but it has been done. I laced up my gloves and entered the ring. He had plenty of ‘I hear ya’s backing him up, too.

Here he was, a creative ex-student of mine, bleating on Facebook about the state of modern music and harking back to the day when musicians played actual instruments, not making ‘sound collages’ by pressing play on a loop.

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