Clams Casino: Jersey dream-hop producer, at the Troc Friday, is a man of many levels

When Langhorne-born Michael Volpe, aka dream-hop producer Clams Casino, decided to name his first album 32 Levels, he didn't do it just because his first real hit - "I'm God," with eclectic rapper Lil B - featured this lyric: "The mind is so complex when you're based/Welcome to my world/32 levels."

Sure, Volpe quietly admits that the 2009 cloud-rap smash was a major turning point in his artistic life. Mainly, though, the longtime Nutley, N.J., resident was trying to express where he hoped his music would go in the title of the album that came out earlier this year.

"Before that , I was just sending MCs like B my stuff online and hoping," he says. "That was really the first song where people got to know my sound." He doesn't want to be pinned down by that sound - rounded-corner rhythms, beautiful spare melodies, breezy ambience - going forward, though.

"I guess I have a lot of levels to me and what I do, and I hope people get to hear that without expecting any one thing. The title is open to interpretation, as the music."

That should make his Friday show at the Trocadero with Lil B as much of a deep listening experience as a rap-a-thon in which they'll perform together and alone. Clams Casino isn't certain if you should file his album and mix tapes under hip-hop or electronic music or even video game scores.

"What are you hearing, Mortal Kombat?" he laughs when the subject of the spooky, racy "Skull" instrumental from 32 Levels comes up. "It's in there, deep down and unconscious."

He snickers, too, thinking that sonic bits of the Zelda game can also be heard within 32 Levels' walls. "I can see and hear how people think beyond hip-hop where my stuff is concerned, and that it attracts people who don't want to hear rap, but just the beats or atmospheres alone. I'm happy to be in several lanes. That keeps me motivated and interested. Keeps me doing it."

A big part of how Clams got to do what he does in the first place - become a bedroom producer and mixologist rather than the drummer he started out to be - comes from his earliest listening habits. His first love was Wu-Tang Clan and its main man, producer RZA. Nothing in his catalog - not the lush Instrumentals mixtape series, his work with Lil B, or the scorched-earth backdrop he provided for Vince Staples' Summertime '06 - resembles that incendiary East Coast gangsta rap. Clams explains that discrepancy away with a wave of his hand.

"That's easy. I would watch videos of RZA producing Wu-Tang tracks, and he would take samples, run them through processors, whatever, and make them sound grittier or dirtier. The main thing that I took away from that was how to manipulate sounds texturally - that was the main thing that inspired me at the start to make beats and music."

Clams started out creating sonic backdrops for neighborhood friends. ("Nothing major, just pals who rapped in Jersey.") Confidence emboldened him to start sending his instrumentals - "via MySpace - sounds so old now, right?" - to rappers such as Lil B and A$AP Rocky, cloud-rap kings attracted to woozy sampled sound and dreary ambient rushes.

"It was just exciting for my mind to be as free as Clams' music is," Lil B said in a rare interview with Noisey.

Working with B, A$AP Rocky, and others on 32 Levels in a studio setting wasn't demonstrably different than working online or in separate places, Clams says. "Yeah, there was probably a certain amount of control I was able to have in doing this stuff without seeing the people I'm working with, but I like the collaboration."

Clams' instrumentals - found on his mixtapes, his work with rap's already rich and famous, or his own Levels - are simply beautiful, but they conjure up a range of emotions. Take, for example, the ragged soul of "Into the Fire," recorded with Mikky Ekko in Nashville, or the murky "All Nite," featuring rap's dark angel, Vince Staples. Casino seems like a guy who is always deep in thought, even when instinct is his guide.

"It wasn't a conscious decision for me to start producing, though, in the first place. It just happened; nothing I thought over. I hit 14 and just got into beat-making. This is how it wound up."

At one point a student of physical therapy (a great fallback if he decides to drop music), Clams Casino does not see any correlation between healing and the therapeutic ear bliss of 32 Levels.

"Music has been in my life far longer than therapy has for me. I'm glad that some of the music I make - and I hope it's all different - has some long-lasting effect beyond what they usually associate with me. I try not to rethink the whole thing, beyond progressing what it is I'm doing and keeping it all natural, so it feels and sounds honest."