In celebration of his birthday and the fact that we’re chest-deep in pisces szn, Berkeley-based beatmaker Ellis Newton, aka Versâam, released a concise, heavily sample-based beat tape last week on February 28. Named after the wateriest of water signs, Pisces Tape II (2019) makes use of heavy filtering, sparse drums, and deep bass lines that allow the vocal samples to shine through the murk of the instrumentals, highlighting some very intentional choices in source material. This tape is remarkably potent at plucking deep nuggets of nostalgia from the millennial brain — Fox has nearly his whole moveset from the iconic [...]