“It was more like, ‘How can I do this without having lawyers come after me?’” His real motivation, he admitted with a laugh, was steering clear of the potential legal troubles that can arise when sampling copyrighted work. True to his retiring nature, though, Clams Casino insisted he wasn’t trying to prove anything about his abilities by favoring original sounds over samples. You can tell he’s proud of his work too: “32 Levels” comes with instrumental versions of each of its dozen tracks, all the better to appreciate the spooky ambient sounds floating beneath Staples’ rapping in “All Nite.” And like DJ Shadow, a master of sampling who built many of the sounds on his new album from scratch, Clams Casino relied less on sampling for “32 Levels” than he did in his earlier work instead of hunting online for source material, he recorded himself playing drums and other instruments, then used software to manipulate the recordings.
You can see traces of the same ambition in work by such serial collaborators as Diplo and DJ Snake. He’s not the only producer to step out on his own lately. “For this I was attracted to the idea of having control over everything creatively, where I didn’t have to compromise.” “A lot of people can have a say in what ends up coming out,” Clams Casino said.
