“I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to take it as far as I can,’” he explains backstage at Turin’s future-facing Club To Club festival, having just played a set of his own hazy-but-heavy boom-bap productions to the receptive Italian crowd, “‘I see an opportunity – let me see how far I can take it.
Five years later and he’s got production credits for A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples, and FKA twigs under his belt and taken his live show around the world. Back in 2011, Michael Volpe was a physical therapy student interning at a hospital in New Jersey while making rap beats in his spare time – literally in his mum’s basement.