“I'll make music that sounds pretty intense or emotional, but I won't be feeling like that at the time,” he says. Sitting at his kitchen island, the thick PC laptop he uses to produce closed shut on the counter nearby, he describes a phenomenon that seems to have defined his process.

In person, Volpe is humble and soft-spoken, and I get the sense that he’s never been fully comfortable putting his music into words. In either case, each instrumental needs to meet a certain emotional threshold that keeps Volpe coming back to it year after year: “Whatever the feeling is, it can be a range of stuff, but it has to be that to the maximum.” The 11 songs are a mix of beats that never found a home with vocalists and songs that Volpe set out to make for himself. Some of the songs on Moon Trip Radio - his first solo release since 2017’s Instrumentals 4 - have been gathering digital dust on Volpe’s hard drive for years he originally made “In A Mirror,” a stuttered march of soft piano chords and swung percussion, over five years ago as part of the score for his cousin’s ballet. I take a long time I need time alone with the music at some point.” “I’m used to that because I know how I work by now.

“I’ll be super productive for a while and then it’s like, Damn, am I ever gonna make anything that I like again?,” he says. On the 15-minute walk to his local coffee shop, wearing a daytime lounge fit of sweatpants and a white T-shirt, Volpe explains that his creative process has always been a cycle of ups and downs. Over the last ten years, he’s faded in and out of the public eye, often appearing in short spurts with innovative solo and collaborative music before retreating back again. In the same way that some artists do through sung lyrics and melody, Volpe has always been able to convey a profound vulnerability with his production. is connected in a way that's not really so up front, but it's there, you know?” But the common denominator between Clams Casino and Lil Peep is also somewhat simple. “I kept going back and listening to it, and then, slowly, I started to understand sense of melody. “At first, I didn't really get it,” he says. For Volpe, who grew up on Mobb Deep and The Diplomats, his connection to the subgenre wasn’t immediate. He mentions his collaborations with Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and the late Lil Peep, two pioneering voices of emo-rap, as a more recent part of that circle of influence.

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