“In a Mirror” marches over shifty piano chords, with a sharp metal click striking at odd intervals heard together, the click brings out a melody in the piano that it isn’t playing directly. “Healing” hides motion behind stillness: while drums and high harp(-ish) strings plunk at double time, a stately violin swells calmly until, finally, the sound of wind drowns out the rest of the song.

Yet there’s tender feeling in this music, and just as you stop to wonder where it might be coming from, along comes the muddy undertow. These tracks hardly move they trickle and tingle in place, as the thick keyboard textures cast drooping shadows. It’s the surreal dream of nature that his beats have hinted at, rendered in electric color.Ĭasino’s instrumental music often projects an initial illusion of formlessness, all the better to surprise you with sneak details later, and Moon Trip Radio reaches a new level of feigned nebulosity. His first official album, 32 Levels (2016), included various rappers and R&B singers (Vince Staples, A$AP Rocky, Lil B, Kelela) in an attempt to go pop or blow it up, but as with many mainstream accommodations, the gesture felt uneven as his collaborators pulled the music too decisively toward their own style.Īs an instrumental studio album, Moon Trip Radio gets it both ways: while diving into the amniotic ocean, it’s more sonically cohesive than the mixtapes, unified by a sustained, woozy gleam.

The records in Casino’s Instrumental Mixtape series (currently on volume 4) are the craftiest of minimalist exercises: some of the tracks are instrumental versions of previously released rap songs, while others are new, but all sound like whooshing abstractions, barely coherent as music, before soothing melodies and harmonic structures reliably surface. When he started releasing his beats on their own, stripped of vocals, he stood revealed as an avant-electronic experimentalist, and a certain friendly weirdness became apparent what sounded murky behind a rapper ’ clicked when presented as a standalone environment with room to breathe.

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