Some have attributed the term to rapper Lil B. Later in 2006 more building blocks, such as hazy and relaxed sounds, can be found in Viper's second album, Ready.and Willing. Įlements of cloud rap, like lo-fi and dreamy atmospheres, can be heard as early as 2001 with cLOUDDEAD's self-titled album. The term 'cloud rap' is popularly used in reference to lo-fi, hazy rap. Origins Ĭloud rap initially came out of Atlanta, Houston, and Memphis during the late 2000s. The term 'cloud rap' is related to its internet birth and its ethereal style. Many music experts credit rapper Lil B and producer Clams Casino as the early pioneers of this style. That was backed by free MP3 releases of his popular instrumentals on download site Mediafire, which made him known as an artist in his own right rather than just another unknown bedroom producer.Cloud rap is a subgenre of rap that has several sonic characteristics of trap music and lo-fi in its hazy, dreamlike and relaxed sound. Forward-thinking imprint Tri Angle put out an EP of instrumentals that repositioned Volpe as a kind of psych-hop outlier. Clams Casino has managed to sit somewhere in the middle. Some of his contemporaries made the transition into bankable mainstream acts – Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, for example – while others have failed to download from the cloud.

He was just in and out.”ĭespite the lack of IRL connections, the pair’s lo-fi spaced-out productions earned the sound the moniker “ cloud rap” and they were bundled together with the likes of early 10s rap tearaways Wolf Gang and Main Attrakionz, and presented as a core part of the scene that mostly existed on Tumblr pages and MySpace accounts. He’d come in and we’d meet in the hallway or something and just say hi. I’d done three shows with him before that but we’d never meet properly at the shows. “We started working online in 2008, it’s almost 10 years. “That was the first time we met and hung out in person,” says Volpe.

Despite Lil B and Volpe working together on their best-known projects (I’m God, is the pair’s biggest hit) they only met in person while working on Volpe’s new album, 32 Levels.

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