We caught up with him at Club To Club to talk adjusting to a touring lifestyle, becoming a solo artist, and what he’s learned from the everyone he’d worked with.Ĭlams Casino: Yeah. Released earlier this year, the album shows how far Volpe’s music has come within a relatively short period of time, and brings together some of his closest collaborators like Lil B, A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples as well as newer faces like Kelela and Future Islands’ Samuel T. He’s also started to accept – albeit tentatively – his role not simply as a ‘rap producer’ but as an artist in his own right with his debut album 32 Levels. Today, music is Volpe’s full-time preoccupation, and it’s led him to work with artists from both the hip hop and R&B world like Schoolboy Q and The Weeknd as well as more unexpected artists like Blood Orange. His style was much-imitated but never bettered in the subsequent years, and he earned praise not only from rap fans but also from indie and electronic music quarters, with experimental label Tri Angle Records tapping him for a follow-up EP. It was full of misty textures, often sampled from YouTube videos, and ghostly voices sourced from artists as unlikely as Imogen Heap and Björk.

By putting the tracks together in one place, Volpe showcased a lo-fi and muzzy style, part-way between hip hop and ambient music. Eventually Volpe collected a handful of these beats together on his first Instrumental Mixtape – released under the name Clams Casino – which demonstrated his remarkable and unique aesthetic. Volpe started his career by sending music out online to rappers like Lil B, Main Attrakionz, and Soulja Boy – the former two were little-known outside of California’s Bay Area at the time, while the latter had taken to experimenting with often wildly different styles following the early viral success of his song “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” a few years earlier.

If it doesn’t work out by the fall or something then I’ll look for a physical therapy job.’” “I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to take it as far as I can,’” he explains backstage at Turin’s future-facing Club To Club festival, having just played a set of his own hazy-but-heavy boom-bap productions to the receptive Italian crowd, “‘I see an opportunity – let me see how far I can take it. Five years later and he’s got production credits for A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples, and FKA twigs under his belt and taken his live show around the world. Back in 2011, Michael Volpe was a physical therapy student interning at a hospital in New Jersey while making rap beats in his spare time – literally in his mum’s basement.

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