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“Cloud rap” has been so absorbed into hip-hop’s identity that it’s hard to remember when it was subversive and new. The title of the latest installment in Clams Casino’s long-running beat-tape series implies that the tracks have been scavenged and preserved, like fading artifacts of a forgotten epoch. Michael Volpe wasn’t the only producer weaving ambient textures into trap beats at the start of the last decade—an era where experimental artists like Shlohmo and Evian Christ collaborated with the likes of Kanye and Drake—but few artists were linked as closely with the subgenre.

Clams’ influence on hip-hop has remained at the elemental level; his work with rappers like Lil B, A$AP Rocky, and Soulja Boy truly shifted the sonic window. Without Clams, it’s hard to imagine Yung Lean or Drain Gang, and rap’s ongoing infatuations with the alternative rock spectrum might not be so passionate either. Clams was out there sampling Thursday in , and now he works alongside a new generation who would probably not be making music without his influence: Lil Peep, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Ghostemane, and Nedarb, who credits “I’m God” as the beat that made him want to start producing.

Instrumental Relics contains many of Clams’ most notable early collaborations (Soulja Boy’s “All I Need,” A$AP Rocky’s “Numb”), as well as three tracks from his Rainforest EP on the late Tri Angle records (“Treetop,” “Drowning,” “Gorilla”), an original cut from the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack (“Crystals”), and a handful of other strays. Most were previously available and have only been remastered here, but “I’m God”—the definitive Clams Casino recording—can now be officially streamed as a standalone piece of music for the very first time. The instrumental’s unforgettable sample has gone from an unapproved flip to a full-fledged feature, with Imogen Heap credited alongside Clams Casino.

“I’m God” was instantly iconic, immediately imitated, and impossible to recreate. Like Clams’ most haunting work, it decays and disintegrates inside your eardrum, more like a Burial composition than what you’d normally expect to hear Soulja Boy rapping over—the kind of thing I wish Mark Fisher had gotten to write about. For all its innovation and ethereality, there’s something timeless about “I’m God,” with drum programming that skews more boom-bap than trap, betraying Clams’ roots in New Jersey and his love of the East Coast’s classics — one of his first collaborations was with Havoc of Mobb Deep.