Leadoff track “Crystals,” featured on Grand Theft Auto V, is an immediate standout, with layers of synthetic drum sounds and static-ridden synths adding up to a sound that witch house should have been. The material is culled from tracks that Clams crafted for A$AP Rocky, DOOM, Mac Miller and Mikky Ekko, though, unsurprisingly, very little of it requires the aid of an emcee to sound its strongest.

On a certain level, Instrumental Mixtape 3 is everything you’d expect from Clams Casino: 40 minutes of dense, glitch beats that are high on melody and marijuana, and plenty intoxicating even without the aid of illegal (outside of Colorado) substances. The man’s all about atmosphere - intoxicated, disorienting atmosphere - and this third Clams Casino Instrumental Mixtape 3 is just as blissfully woozy as its predecessors. For as in-demand as Clams Casino has been as a hip-hop beatmaker, though, the music works equally well, if not better, divorced from a lyrical context. In 20, respectively, Volpe compiled a series of instrumental beat tracks into a pair of instrumental mixtapes, highlights of which showed up on albums and mixtapes by A$AP Rocky, Main Attrakionz, Lil B and numerous others. And though hip-hop certainly hasn’t ever shied away from psychedelia, Clams is known for a signature kind of sonic trip - one that can feel like it moves at the pace of molasses, yet knocks all the same. It’s slow and dreamlike, thick and syrupy, and more than a little disorienting. Clams, aka New Jersey-based beatmaker Mike Volpe, has the kind of aesthetic that can take years to cultivate. But it took the ethereal, ganja-smoke-laced beats of Clams Casino to get him there. Technically, Lil B coined the term, once vocalizing his own aim to make music that sounded like a castle floating in the clouds. “ Cloud rap,” as ephemeral a genre as it is, wouldn’t exist without Clams Casino.

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