He’d bought tickets to one of Lil B’s New York shows, but he’d left early because his friends couldn’t get in. I had no idea who the artists were or anything.” He’d never met Lil B.

He crafted tracks by seeking out samples based entirely on mood: “To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word - like ‘blue’ or ‘cold’ - into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results. He was Mike Volpe, a hospital intern and physical therapy student in his early twenties who just looked at music as some weird hobby. In 2011, my friend Ryan Dombal tracked down this figure who’d fascinated so many of us, and he learned that Clams Casino was just some guy, which somehow made him more interesting. When Lil B stepped away from the Pack, the Bay Area post-hyphy pop-rap group, and became a mantra-chanting internet enigma, he got a lot of his gravitas from Clams Casino, the mysterious producer who supplied him with dazed, gluey beats - Kanye West/Just Blaze-style sped-up soul samples, transformed into woozy, drifting fantasias of sound.

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