Instrumentals 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. Clams Casino is a New England producer who's made beats for the likes of Lil B and Soulja Boy. He's also released records on UK imprint Tri Angle, and now with the official release of his first mixtape, John Twells' ambient/experimental institution Type. These might seem like incongruous facts, but one listen to Instrumentals—first released as a free download by the producer himself earlier.
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.
Favorite track: Unchain Me. Goatiehooves An amazing compilation of all the tracks Clams Casino put out through different time periods of my life. Each track holds such significance and sentiment that I hold dear to my heart. Above and beyond the most beautifully produced music out there. Clams Casino brings some of his most famous beats to DSP's. For anyone who's been seeking some of Clams Casino's early works on streaming services, the producer has blessed fans with Instrumental. Instrumentals is the debut mixtape of American record producer Clams Casino. It was self-released as a free digital download on March 7, 2011. It features instrumentals of tracks that he produced for various rappers, including some bonus songs. In July 2011, Instrumentals was reissued by Type Records as a physical release.
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.
Instrumentals Clams Casino
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.
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.
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Call and response: I say 'soul' and you think of what? A world where everything is smooth, all honey and gold, hushed lushness and midnight love? Is that your soul music: a sonorous, velvety voice expressing sexual ecstasy, unending pleasure, love-as-wonderful-addiction ('can't get enough of your love, babe'). Or does 'soul' conjure experiences, personal or political? A luxurious agony, tells of haunted nights and miserable mornings, shadowed by grief, heartbreak and loss. These are things we call 'soul music'. But another kind has to exist because the soul is, as any sinister Southern preacher will tell you, a troubled and wicked thing, full of sound and fury, led astray by demonic desires. The lives of the great soul men are riots of angst, addiction and sexual turmoil (think of James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Bobby Womack). What does a damned soul sound like?
Clams Casino's Instrumentals 2 is an astonishing combination: the longing and heartbreak of soul music staggering into a defaced, delirious kind of hip-hop. It's a soul music hollowed, with its regal delirium turning dark. Everything is wasted. Now, this is the weird thing: soul music is never instrumental because people think electronic equipment doesn't have a soul, and that soul can only be broadcast by the voice, but it's running through this mixtape, sinful, sorrowful and sad.
The absence of A$AP Rocky and Lil' B's voices means you can hear its luscious gloom in full glory and there's no obvious sense of loss, or spaces longing to be inhabited, holding their breath, like you find on some instrumental collections. But a special thrill is removed, too, that comes from the glorious juxtaposition of these eerie, smoky soundscapes with those voices howling about drugs, cash and rough sex. It's A$AP Rocky's numb and nimble rhymes that transform the black-eyed, brain-damaged lurch of 'Bass' into a magical spell. But there are still voices, buried alive in thick, delicious noise or slowed down to a hallucinatory growl: soul voices bruised purple. They come straight from the work of DJ Screw who, as theorist and DJ Jace Clayton put it, 'dislocates body from voice' making 'baritone rappers sound demonic... and female singers melt into androgyny'. Purple is the DJ Screw colour. Through a bizarre hip-hop ritual of transubstantiation, purple drank (the opiate mixture of cough syrup and Sprite Screw regularly ingested and which stopped his heart) has become representative of the man and his method of aural disorientation.
This is the A$AP crew's way of getting wasted but it also points towards a rich and strange noise. 'Screwed', or slowed down, sound becomes spooky and sick with lust. Among the feast of riches he left for our consumption ('Grabbin' Grain' is wonderful, his molestation of 'In the Air Tonight' is a treat) there's a version of Teddy Pendergrass' 'Love T.K.O'. The tune is untouched until a heartbroken tumble into the syrup at the end, cavernous drums falling down stairs and vocals going s-l-o-w. Just like DJ Screw, Clams Casino is drugging commercial music and corrupting its soul, its phantom essence. A T.K.O is the effect of any opiate (a blank and gorgeous sense of heaviness), and it's the mood of Clams Casino's mixtapes, and the state they put you in. You're incapacitated, you don't know what's hit you.
This is the huge sound William Blake described in his visionary work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the rumble that comes as 'hungry clouds swag on the deep'. And if 'swag' has become a magic word and a kind of virus, then watch the clouds, too, which are about to take all kinds of shapes. 'Cloud rap' is what you're apparently meant to call this stuff, because it's hip-hop turned woozy, permanently strung out and sky-high. This is the glorious sound of music fucked up on heavy narcotics, barely able to keep its eyes open, drifting off in the middle of a... oh, shit, what's happened? Imagine the noise of the 'ten million pounds of sludge' the Pixies sang about melting and exploding: that's what Clams Casino sounds like.
And listen to this, from David Foster Wallace's enormous novel of addiction and altered states Infinite Jest, where a drug addict lies in hospital, drifting towards his death. 'He seemed to sort of sleep. He fever-dreamed of dark writhing storm clouds... screaming down on the beach'. That's the sound of Clams Casino, too: feverish, hallucinatory and dark. It has the same woozy rush to it that you hear on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and shares its fascination with glittering textures and drifting voices. I remember being hypnotised by the kaleidoscopic coda to 'Only Shallow' during a night of devilish activity and feeding my head into a speaker. Instrumentals 2 makes me want to do it again. Brian Eno called My Bloody Valentine 'the vaguest music ever to be a hit' and this is what's so exciting about Clams Casino's music, too, its delicious vagueness that instantly conjures and induces a strange state, a 'sort of sleep' inhabited by slow motion ghosts. 'Vagueness' doesn't mean something undeveloped or opaque in this case, but a mood that's supremely seductive but unable to be spelled out - an unnameable allure.
Another presence is ringing in my dreaming ears and lurking behind all this material about clouds and 'cloud rap'. cLOUDDEAD sounded like hip-hop recorded in a vast lunar wasteland, heavy with echo and sumptuous sadness. Bizarre and oblique in a captivating way, cLOUDDEAD have the same effect as Clams Casino. The obvious difference is that cLOUDDEAD's first album features lyrics about 'taking up space in a residence of stars'. It sounds like the poetry of John Ashbery read by a gang of weird children (I would like, incidentally, to fully encourage an album in this vein, produced by David Lynch or Prince). But 'I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses Again' makes the similarity clear. The same dreamy feeling surrounds everything, a sensation of 'sinking deeper into a vat of honey glaze', as cLOUDDEAD called it elsewhere.
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Now, eleven years later, this strange and wonderful music is the perfect sound for hip-hop hooked on serious sensory derangement. That this isn't otherworldly, underground music but the sound of money-hungry hip hop keeping it (un)real is cause for manic celebration. I think I'm dreaming. Somewhere the Devil is stroking Clams Casino's soul.