This guy may only be a hobbyist crafting beats in his basement, but he’s clearly got something of an auteurist sensibility, even if at this point only a modest one. It’s no surprise, then, that Rolling Stone called Clams Casino “visionary“-not because he’s some kind of prophetic genius but because, quite simply, his music boasts such persistence of vision. This is what you might call quintessentially atmospheric, a textbook case of tone not only supplanting substance but also, remarkably, becoming in and of itself substantial, something worth lauding.

Meaning this isn’t some half-hearted dalliance with Burial-copping textures and night-bus ambience. I think that at heart we’re all suckers for pure craftsmanship, whether that be the old-fashioned, well-oiled mechanics of a new Bond blockbuster or the warm, inviting hip-hop soundscapes of Clams Casino, whose debut mixtape is to atmosphere what Gravity’s Rainbow is to heady postmodernism. Part of the reason overtly “Lynchian” films feel hollow is that they tend only to affect the general tone of Lynch’s work, conflating style and meaning and forgetting, crucially, that the ambient qualities of his films are simply byproducts of the psychology which informs them-and of course it’s their psychological dimension, more so than their eerie idiosyncrasies, that makes his stuff endure.īut then every so often an album or film will come around that sells its atmospherics so convincingly that I’m willing to overlook its superficiality. As a general rule, atmosphere is a weak stand-in for substance, and one ought to be leery of any art that privileges a vague suggestion of something over the thing itself.

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