“Leave it up to Clams / He got us,” Lil B intones at the beginning of Clams Casino’s full-length major-label debut, the first genuine album from cultishly revered producer Mike Volpe. It’s a statement that speaks not only to Lil B’s trust that Volpe will come through—as he has on all his best tracks—but to his gratitude at finding someone who understood his misfit approach, who took Lil B’s bizarre meme-riffs and flat affect and surrounded them with ethereal, ambient bliss, together creating the spacey “based world” of cloud rap. Volpe—a physical therapy student who recorded his spectral soundscapes as a hobby, then sent them to Lil B and other rappers unsolicited—recognized these kindred spirits on the genre fringes. And after staking out his peculiarly haunted corner of hip-hop and electronic music with his Rainforest EP and a trilogy of acclaimed Instrumentals self-releases, those allies now come to repay the favor on 32 Levels, an album that aims to officially enshrine Clams Casino as one of the most iconoclastic producers in the business, even among those who didn’t “get” it the first time.
As it’s both dominated and defined by those guest voices, 32 Levels is more of a mixtape of Volpe’s contacts folder than a concise artistic statement—and as such, it’s not the most complete picture of his work, particularly for beginners. But it does trace a certain chronological evolution of Clams’ career, beginning with a first half dominated by the sort of blown-out, bottom-heavy rap tracks that first got Volpe attention, with Lil B appearing on four songs—recorded, for the first time, in each other’s company, after years spent trading ideas over the internet. Most notable of these is the stark, glowering “Be Somebody,” a duet that finds Lil B trading some of his most linear rhymes to date with fellow Clams vet ASAP Rocky. As the two prowl confidently over horror soundtrack drones and one of Volpe’s disembodied, beautifully anguished vocal hooks—resembling the ghostly transmission of some long-forgotten new wave ballad bleeding between stations—the song nails that sweet spot between mesmerizing and menacing where Clams Casino lives.
Also for the first time, here that sound is totally organic. Forgoing his early practices of sampling songs by searching random words on LimeWire, Volpe spent the past several years recording almost all of those beats and bricolage himself. There’s also a stronger sense of Volpe tailoring his material specifically for who’s rapping over it. The bleak, brittle drumbeats, eerie birdsong, and metallic synth washes of “All Nite,” for example, are as perfectly matched to Vince Staples’ adenoidal snarl as they were on previous collaborations like last year’s “Norf Norf,” and they combine for one of the most galvanizing songs either artist has delivered yet. And it’s hard to imagine anyone else making Lil B’s blunt, idiot savant raps like, “Shout out to France, shout out to Japan / Everywhere I go, man, they do the rain dance” sound as deeply X-Files-mysterious as Volpe does on the eerie, sizzling “Witness.”