“That was it for two years, just building up that list of email contacts and sending beats out.” It was a slow burn fueled by patience and determination that above all awarded Volpe space and time to tinker away behind closed doors, crystalizing what would become his very own class of sonic logic.Įventually, Volpe caught the attention of rapper Lil B, who was fast emerging as an eccentric, versatile, and brilliantly warped artist.

I would send out twenty or thirty messages a day asking what the best email was to send beats to,” Volpe explains. “When I decided to take it seriously and get my beats out, the internet seemed like the best way to do it at the time, so I would use MySpace to send messages to artists’s and rappers’s pages. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that any of this came easily. He has accrued what could only be described as an unrivaled catalog of collaborations-A$AP Rocky, Lil B, FKA Twigs, and Blood Orange among them, not to mention the official remixes he has produced for hit machines like Sia, Lana Del Rey, and Florence and the Machine. Since arriving on the scene in 2011 with his game-changing Instrumental Mixtape, his first of three acclaimed beat tapes under the guise of Clams Casino, Volpe has become a respected artist in his own right. Many years on from his early bedroom beat-making, the 29-year-old New Jersey native has plenty to feel good about. For the then-fourteen-year-old, the next logical step was to purchase a sampler and start producing beats of his own. It was the period of rap music spilling over into the early Zeros that Volpe credits as the most influential time for him, musically speaking.

“I first started listening to hip hop in the late Nineties-a lot of East Coast, New York hip hop, stuff like that,” he recalls. Who could forget the years marking the turn of the century when East Coast rappers like Nas, Busta Rhymes, Jay Z, and 50 Cent were dominating the airwaves with their self-assured lyricism, heavy hooks, and sharp wordplay?įor hip hop producer Michael Volpe, or Clams Casino as he is better known to his fans, the story starts here.

It is where many of the genre’s seminal artists emerged during New York’s infamous block parties of the Seventies-old-school legends like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang-and where so many of rap’s defining landmarks continue to transpire. The East Coast will forever remain the rightful home of pure, uncut rap music.

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