Clams Casino — Rainforest EP
As with his production work for others Clams subscribes to the DJ Screw school of down tempo stretched and skewed use of voice and distortion, building up dense layers of sound underpinned by slow soulful beats. The rainforest EP takes this approach and pushes it into even more epic and gothic territory.
Natural is the opener and slowest of the five tracks. Unintelligible yearning female voice samples are deconstructed and scattered about lolling bass and distorted strings giving a sense of deep soulful melancholy. Treetop signifies that we are far away from the trite clichés of commercial hip-hop with its prevalent use of field recordings featuring birds, crickets and rustling foliage. Clams threads a simple arpeggio synth line across his customary beat, this time less thumping, more introspective and isolated.
The standout track Waterfalls is a massive surge of distortion, voice and electronic wizardry. Crunching bass and drum rhythms are circulated by overdriven synth and chanting voices. Whatever the vocal originally was has been utterly obscured leaving a cyborg soul singer heralding the end of time; and all of this set in some huge abandoned cathedral on the edge of a disintegrating metropolis. It’s with tracks like this you can see why some have described Clams as the best producer on the planet right now.
The sadly short EP finishes with Gorilla another epic slab of isolationist melodrama that might just as well feature on the soundtrack to a David Fincher movie about urban zombies with the best tunes in town. Again it’s the warped use of the human voice and end-time beats that disconcerts as much as urging a fist pump to the fall of the old world. One of the records of the year without doubt.